Apple M3 Pro Chip Has 25% Less Memory Bandwidth Than M1/M2 Pro

Well, that’s a bummer, but it will be interesting to see how it stacks up on day-to-day usage.
It’s not that the folks on the base M3 are going to stress out the machine with high computation tasks, but the Pro and Max surely will have enough people talking about synthetic benchmarks vs real benchmarks to see what optimizations Apple made that and are not paying off.

I’m pretty close to getting a used m1 air for $500.
I can probably search a bit and get a slightly better deal.
The price might be a bit high, but I’m not in the US and we have higher prices here.
- I’ve been really happy with my m1 air.
  
  Yeah me too; I bought it to replace a 2013 MBP. Its so light, the battery life is rediculous, and its far gruntier than I need for the work I do which is mostly in a shell / nvim etc anyway.
- I just got one for around $600 in the US on Swappa. I tried to get one cheaper but couldn’t find it where I lived. Anyway, I’m super happy with it. I made sure it was a low number of battery cycles and it’s in near mint condition.
  The other day, I was coding in VSStudio, debugging JavaScript in Chrome with multiple tabs open, and logging issues I found on a template in Excel. Excel alone makes my work computer freeze and I didn’t notice a single slow down on this thing. It was fantastic.
  I don’t love the way Mac handles open-window management but aside from that I’m very happy.
  
  Do you have 8gb of ram in your machine?
  There is an electronics market where I live. I have a recentish lenovo it actually might be a year newer than the M1 so I am going to try and swap it. Maybe I can go next week.

I really am interested to see it go up against the new snapdragon elite chip. Hopefully some competition at last!
- I'd love a system with the efficiency of ARM and real out of the box support for Linux. Like a state-of-the-art Raspberry Pi.
  
  I would love to see a state-of-the-art RISC-V laptop, but we are not quite there yet. A good power efficient Linux laptop running on ARM would be pretty cool in the meantime.
- The only way to put a shame on Apple is the Laptop OEM manufacturers ship their entry level laptops and mini desktop computers equipped with Snapdragon Elite X chip with baseline 16GB of RAM, and $50 to upgrade to 32GB, 512GB of SSD, and adequate price to upgrade without robbing the customers. If they really want to retain and re-capture the market share from Dracula Tim Cook before bleeding out much like the Nokia, this is a step to take before even more people get hooked up on Apple ecosystem, because once they are into the ecosystem, it is hard to get out from data and services they signed into it. I am curious if a class-action suit can be brought against Apple in the memory and SSD pricing debacles.

What the fuck is with this trend of releasing a great product and then 2-3 generations later nerfing the shit out of the memory bandwidth? Nvidia, Intel, I think AMD, and now Apple are all guilty of this recently.
- This is why competition is always a must, when Apple released the M1 series, the entire tech industry basically shitting on Intel, and spell the death of x86. Make no mistake, Arm-based chips are leading years ahead for efficiency and performance per watt. Qualcomm's Snapdragon Elite X and Microsoft already signed the exclusive deal to sell Arm-based laptop running Windows, coming in 2024. Nvidia and AMD also announced Arm-based PC chips to market in 2025.
  On the GPU front, Nvidia basically abandoned the former customers (gamers) that put the company into a trillion dollar company, Jensen Huang now focus on server and AI chip market now that selling 1000x times the MSRP gamer-tier RTX GPU a piece. Just look at the RTX 4000 series pricing and the VRAM for entry and mid-tier cards. Intel Arc and AMD Radeon are decades behind Nvidia in terms of software API, the CUDA ecosystem is the one that allowed Nvidia to basically monopolize the AI field and milking its customers. Gamers are no longer needed by Nvidia, they will continue to release subpar GPU that barely keep up with the expected generational leap, by CUDA cores, VRAM, memory bandwitdth, some are even downgraded, ffs.
- This is no mistake. They've purposefully cut a ton of corners with the M1, to make it stand out in exceptional ways. Thankfully for them, everything aligned perfectly in the timeline they expected, however, cutting corners won't cut it anymore. Now that the dust has settled, they need to keep up with the r&d, and push forward again. It is not an accident, that they're comparing M3 performance to the M1 series
  
  I don't understand your comment at all. They cut corners how? Why is it no accident they are comparing M3 to M1.

This was a real bummer for anyone interested in running local LLMs. Memory bandwidth is the limiting factor for performance in inference, and the Mac unified memory architecture is one of the relatively cheaper ways to get a lot of memory rather than buying a specialist AI GPU for $5-10k. I was planning to upgrade the memory a bit further than normal on my next MBP upgrade in order to experiment with AI, but now I’m questioning whether the pro chip will be fast enough to be useful.

M3 Pro has 150GB/s bandwidth vs 200 for the M2 Pro. I think that can be explained by using 3 6GB/12GB modules for the RAM vs 4 on the M2.
The M3 Max is listed as “up to" 400GB/s, where the M2 Max doesn't have that qualifier. The 14 core I think is always using 3 24GB/32GB wider modules for 300GB/s, the 16 core is always using 4 for 400GB/s.

Easy way to save on power.

No more Jim Keller architecture design. Same thing will probably happen to AMD when they need to move on from Zen. Bulldozer 2.0.

Doubt it will make a difference that anyone except benchmarkers will notice.

- Just because it costs more doesn't mean it's better. Just look at windows 11 vs 7.
  
  That's my point: it costs more but has less memory bandwidth, which people here seem to consider a GOOD thing, or at least thats what they seem to be trying to convince themselves and others of.
- Only one person here who says it’s an easy way to save power.