The Apple M3 Pro chip is official thanks to a surprise announcement at the Apple Scary Fast event, and it looks to be one of the most exciting chips Apple has ever produced.
The new M3 Pro chip was definitely a late October surprise from the Cupertino giant, as many of the rumors surrounding the new chip didn’t have it released until 2024 at the earliest, and the Apple M3 chip hadn’t even been announced yet (he, along with the Apple M3 Max, were also announced together with the M3 Pro).
So what do we know about the successor to the Apple M2 Pro chip? Quite a lot, as it turns out, so let’s dive in.
Apple M3 Pro chip: getting to the point
- What is it? The successor to Apple’s M2 Pro chip
- When will it be available? Pre-orders are live now, shipping on November 7th
- How much is it? Won’t sell on its own, but the MacBook Pro 14-inch with M3 Pro starts at $1,999 (about £1,640, AU$2,900) and the MacBook Pro 16-inch with M3 Pro starts at $2,499 (about £2,050, AU$ 3,625).
Apple M3 Pro chip: release date
The Apple M3 Pro chip will not be sold on its own, but the new Apple MacBook Pro 14-inch with M3 Pro and Apple MacBook Pro 16-inch with M3 Pro went up for pre-order on October 30, 2023 and will To start available in 27 countries around the world, with more to come.
While you can pre-order now, you’ll have to wait about a week before you can actually get your hands on new hardware with the Apple M3 Pro chip, as the new MacBook Pro models ship on Tuesday, November 7.
After the 7th, the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models with M3 Pro will be available for purchase at every Apple Store and other retailers such as Best Buy.
Apple M3 Pro chip: price
The Apple M3 Pro chip won’t be sold on its own, but will instead power the new 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models. An Apple MacBook Pro 14-inch with M3 Pro starts at $1,599 (about £1,330, AU$2,320) and the MacBook Pro 16-inch with M3 Pro starts at $2,499 (about £2,050, AU$3,625).
There’s no word yet on whether the Mac mini will get the M3 Pro, but considering you can get the Mac mini with M2 Pro, we expect that device will eventually be upgraded to the Apple M3 Pro chip as well.
Apple M3 Pro chip: specifications and performance
The new Apple M3 Pro has a number of noticeable improvements over the Apple M2 Pro.
First off, there’s no 10-core CPU option, just a 12-core CPU, with six performance cores and six efficiency cores. It supports up to 36 GB of unified memory, 4 GB more than the M2 Pro.
In terms of performance, the M3 Pro will have 30% better single-core performance than the Apple M1 Pro, according to Apple, and even with these performance improvements, the M3 Pro should deliver the same battery life as the M2 Pro thanks to efficiency improvements in the SoC.
The biggest improvement comes with the 18-core GPU, but with the first Apple chip with support for hardware-accelerated ray tracing, mesh shading and something Apple calls Dynamic Caching.
This latest technology allocates memory to GPU-intensive tasks exactly according to process needs, meaning that memory allocation will be much more efficient and will generally get much better performance from memory.
Of course, we’ll have to see how well these technologies work in practice once we get one of the new MacBook Pro models for review, but needless to say, we expect this to be one of the best mobile workstation processors around.