TechInsights: What does the release of Apple's M3 series chips mean?
On the evening of October 30th, Apple held a "Scary Fast" event and unveiled new Mac products, including the next-generation chips.
According to the information obtained from the Zhitong Finance APP, on November 9th, TechInsights reported that Apple (AAPL.US) held a "Scary Fast" event on October 30th, unveiling new Mac products including the next-generation chips. The name "Scary Fast" has a dual meaning; firstly, the speed and efficiency of the new M3 series chips are 50% faster than the M1 series, which is Apple's first-generation Arm-based chip. Secondly, the event lasted only 30 minutes, which is uncommon for technology product launches.
TechInsights stated that Apple has lowered the starting price of the 14-inch MacBook Pro equipped with the new M3 chip from $1999 to $1599. Although the MacBook Pro still dominates the high-end market, the price reduction makes it more competitive compared to performance-similar commercial laptops such as Microsoft Surface, Dell Latitude, and HP EliteBook. It is an open secret that Apple wants to gain a larger share in the commercial laptop market, and the upgrade cycle between Windows 10 and Windows 11 is an excellent opportunity to attract enterprises seeking change.
The M3 series chips are the first PC chips to adopt 3nm process technology, which improves speed and efficiency. The M3 series also represents a significant leap in GPU technology, using a new dynamic cache that allocates local memory only for real-time execution tasks - a first in the PC industry, and supports ray tracing - a first on Mac. The performance and efficiency cores of the M3 CPU are 30%-50% faster than the M1 series. The enhanced neural engine is 60% faster than the M1 series, and the new media engine includes support for AV1 decoding, allowing for higher quality videos from streaming services.
TechInsights stated that while the overall performance improvement will attract many Mac users based on Intel and M1 to upgrade, Apple also hopes to attract a new group of customers with more powerful GPU, ray tracing and neural engine, as well as up to 128GB of unified memory. Developers and gamers may consider Mac when purchasing a new PC. With the exponential growth and use of artificial intelligence, security and privacy have become the top concerns for enterprises and consumers. Apple's faster neural engine keeps AI workloads on the device, protecting user privacy. Although CloudAI has greater scalability and capacity, its security is much weaker, which means that most enterprises prefer to keep some work content outside the public cloud, and Apple hopes to take advantage of this.
