The first Macs with an M3 chip could arrive this year—but when, exactly?
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Finding Intel and AMD pinouts for products that are used by dozens of manufacturers is hard enough, I sincerely doubt you'll be able to find this info easily enough for M series.
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That won't stop a determined hobbyist or someone who wants to hire a shop that does component level board repair.
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3nm... what a world we live in that we're looking at another unit of measurement for circuits being designed today. 20Å will equal 2nm... I wonder if others will follow Intel's naming convention.
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Apple Mac Studio M3 Ultra with 256GB+ of RAM is gonna look like a bargain compared to a pair of A100 80GB if you an AI researcher.
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Or features.
It’s highly likely that a fair number of those transistors will be used to implement new functionality. Ray tracing for the GPU and more ML-specific accelerators seem pretty likely as does SVE2. Yes that does improve performance but it’s very different than the x% CPU performance uplift most people think of when you say “performance upgrade”.
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Yes, and you'd have to get it out of another machine with the same hardware spec as you're looking for., since they don't exactly sell them as a stand-alone part. (Also, the RAM is in the same package.)
It seems unlikely to me that the package will be the same anyway. Why make a chip way smaller, then put it in the same envelope? But maybe they just load up the 3nm wafer with way more cores.
In any case, this is how you'd do it: https://www.ifixit.com/News/62674/m2-macbook-air-teardown-apple-forgot-the-heatsink (plus desoldering the chip from the machine you're upgrading, and the one you're cannibalizing, then soldering all those pins down.
But I figure if iFixit finds it daunting to open one of these up, WITHOUT desoldering it...
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Things have come so far.
I remember seeing engineering samples of the PowerPC 603e and a few weeks later getting prototypes in a familiar enclosure, but close to 100% faster than the PowerBook 5300s the prototype was based on.
I was a bit nonplussed by the 13” M1 I used for a year, and I’m happy with my M1 Pro-based MacBook Pro. Feeling a kick in the pants speed increase Would be welcome, but these things are already insanely quick for general productivity.
I remember seeing engineering samples of the PowerPC 603e and a few weeks later getting prototypes in a familiar enclosure, but close to 100% faster than the PowerBook 5300s the prototype was based on.
I was a bit nonplussed by the 13” M1 I used for a year, and I’m happy with my M1 Pro-based MacBook Pro. Feeling a kick in the pants speed increase Would be welcome, but these things are already insanely quick for general productivity.
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Intel and AMD publish datasheets with pinouts, electrical characteristics, timings. Apple doesn't. But never underestimate the determined hobbyist with an X-ray machine in his lab. Ben isn't into that kind of thing, but somebody else might be. And I was merely wondering if somebody came across such a thing and wanted to share that knowledge.
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3nm... Amazing times we live in. At what scale is some equivalent form of ECC required to handle tunneling and does anyone have any ideas on how it would work?
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Remember that "3nm" is basically a marketing term for "this year's version of Really Small" and doesn't correspond to the size of any specific feature. It's been that way for a while now.
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I love my 13” MBP. It’s a 2020 Intel model, as I still need to dual-boot Windows, but I will likely replace it with another 13” MBP with Apple Silicon in the future when I get a dedicated PC for SolidWorks. Not everyone wants a huge laptop…At first I thought, "Debut on the 13" Pro? Surely not!" In my mind, that machine is a sideshow, a laptop that nobody should buy, and whose very existence is puzzling. Then I remembered that Apple once said that that was their best-selling laptop.
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I did a quick search for Intel pinouts and the links were all to third party websites. Do you have links to pinouts on intel.com? I'd love to see them.
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It's just a weird product compared to the Air is all, there's some differences of course but still rather small. And it's much closer to the Air than the rest of the Pro line so the name just feels wrong.
If they hold the Air back on last gen M2 though I suppose that changes things a bit and creates that product gap that people get hung up on.
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3nm is just a marketing term
The actual size https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3_nm_process
The actual size https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3_nm_process
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Totally agree. I moved from a 16-inch Intel MacBook Pro to a 16-inch M1 Pro MacBook. All the speed I need with way better battery life. All this begs the question about is there really a mass market for incremental upgrades, and an M3 is an incremental upgrade so long as Apple keeps Operating System upgrades runnable on M1 machines.
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I was nonplussed by your comment. The dictionary explains in detail:
non·plussed| nänˈpləst | (also non-plused)
adjective
1 (of a person) surprised and confused so much that they are unsure how to react: he would be completely nonplussed and embarrassed at the idea.
2 North American informal (of a person) not disconcerted; unperturbed.
USAGE
In standard use, nonplussed means ‘surprised and confused’: the hostility of the new neighbor's refusal left Mrs. Walker nonplussed. In North American English, a new use has developed in recent years, meaning ‘unperturbed’—more or less the opposite of its traditional meaning: hoping to disguise his confusion, he tried to appear nonplussed. This new use probably arose on the assumption that non- was the normal negative prefix and must therefore have a negative meaning. It is not considered part of standard English.
adjective
1 (of a person) surprised and confused so much that they are unsure how to react: he would be completely nonplussed and embarrassed at the idea.
2 North American informal (of a person) not disconcerted; unperturbed.
USAGE
In standard use, nonplussed means ‘surprised and confused’: the hostility of the new neighbor's refusal left Mrs. Walker nonplussed. In North American English, a new use has developed in recent years, meaning ‘unperturbed’—more or less the opposite of its traditional meaning: hoping to disguise his confusion, he tried to appear nonplussed. This new use probably arose on the assumption that non- was the normal negative prefix and must therefore have a negative meaning. It is not considered part of standard English.
It is good that you were not confused.
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It depends on what you use a laptop for. A 13" is the perfect size for a laptop you actually carry around regularly -- much smaller and the keyboard gets cramped, much bigger and the whole thing becomes too heavy and bulky. It's not a desktop replacement by itself, but you can plug a monitor into it if you need to use it that way. It's also about the largest size that you can use on an airplane tray table without elbowing the person next to you.At first I thought, "Debut on the 13" Pro? Surely not!" In my mind, that machine is a sideshow, a laptop that nobody should buy, and whose very existence is puzzling. Then I remembered that Apple once said that that was their best-selling laptop.
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There’s a chance both these rumors are people getting ahead of themselves and the M3 won’t appear until 2024. The iMac and the iPad Air are the two remaining M1 products, both are colorful, family-friendly builds that could be the focus of the October event, but with M2, not M3. At that point, the refresh cycle for M2 is complete.
The A17 is the main event in September, plus there’s Vision Pro coming in early 2024, no doubt also with 3nm silicon. The M3 might be the third 3nm silicon to be released, possibly as late as June 2024, two years after the M2.
The A17 is the main event in September, plus there’s Vision Pro coming in early 2024, no doubt also with 3nm silicon. The M3 might be the third 3nm silicon to be released, possibly as late as June 2024, two years after the M2.
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The reason why many people think the 13" is superfluous is that it's just a MacBook Air that's thicker and has a fan, despite the MacBook Pro name. It might throttle a bit later on heavy workloads, but it's not any more powerful. The 13" MacBook Air is better at being portable which is the use case you're mentioning.
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Everyone is clamoring for the M3 chip, when their line hasn’t even been fully moved to M2. Isn’t it possible that’s the iMac refresh? If it’s M3 it would likely be the most basic version so as not to outshine the Mac Pro/Studio.
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Historically MacBook Pro redesigns have debuted at the high end, then over time trickle down to the base Pro model. It may be eventually replaced by a 14” Pro with a M (non-Pro) chip
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Intel/AMD chip packages tend to be filled solid with pinouts. If M1/M2 is similar, they’d have trouble shrinking the package for M3 even if the chip itself is smaller.
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As someone who regularly makes comments that are unflattering to Apple I am familiar with the challenging crowd. However I am also aware that a well crafted, good faith, honest, and accurate comment that is critical of Apple will generally be very well received. You just have to put in a bit extra effort compared to most articles to make your comment good.
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Specially for a device which is so constrained in terms of battery life and, one would expect, performance and thermals. It makes little sense to launch it with a last gen processor.
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I guess one reason why everyone is clamoring for M3 is because, while M2 was a decent incremental improvement, its additional performance didn’t blow minds like the initial batch of M1 Macs did. I have my doubts about M3 being able to pass that incredible hurdle, but hey, I’d be happy to be proven wrong.
Edit: me no grammar good.
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