TECH

Apple M3: 12-core with support for 36GB of RAM

Company Apple is preparing a successor to its M2 processors and it is believed to be a series Apple M3. We know that it should be manufactured using TSMC’s 3nm process, but it is not clear when it will be. It was originally speculated that it should be this year, but now it looks like it will probably happen at the end of this year or rather at the beginning of next year. On the contrary, it is becoming more common to talk about the fact that a 15″ variant of the MacBook Air should appear this June. But let’s go back to the Apple M3 processors. In recent days, there have been rumors that a 12-core processor has been spotted Apple M3 Pro. The media usually highlight the increase in the number of cores and expect higher performance, but the listed specifications look a bit strange.

Today’s weakest version of the M2 Pro has 10 CPU cores and 16 GPU cores, while supporting a maximum of 32 GB of shared memory. In that case, the M3 Pro, which is rumored to have 12 CPU cores and 18 GPU cores, including an increase in memory capacity to 36GB, would really be a nice increase. However, the fact is that the M2 Pro was (and still is) also available in a variant with 12 CPU cores and 19 GPU cores. The novelty presented above would even be a step back in the number of cores (one GPU core would be removed). It is even rumored to have a 6P+6E configuration, while the M2 Pro has 8P+4E.

Deploying such a processor in the expected 14″ and 16″ MacBooks Pro would probably not bring much extra performance (probably only due to higher frequencies) and rather the main positive would be lower consumption (and therefore better efficiency). So far, the situation is still quite unclear and it will be interesting to see where the basic M3 will go and where the most powerful M3 Max variants will go.

Milan Šurkala