Announced last week, Apple’s Halloween keynote will be less full of surprises than expected. New rumors reveal everything Apple should present on stage between now and tomorrow.
If you don’t want to wait until 1 a.m. tonight to find out what Apple has in stock, good news, Bloomberg has spoiled the surprise. In an article, signed by the always very well informed Mark Gurman, the American media reveals the announcements that Apple should make this evening. The event should largely revolve around three new in-house chips: the Apple Silicon M3, M3 Pro and M3 Max. A big challenge for the apple brand.
Apple moves to 3nm
Indeed, since the formalization of its range of ARM processors in 2020 with the MacBook Pro M1, Apple has unveiled each new generation of chips with a rather leisurely pace. The M2 chip arrived (on the MacBook Air) almost two years after the M1 and the M2 Pro and Max chips were the subject of many rumors before finally being revealed in the MacBook Pro 2023. But this year, endless waiting point to find out what Apple has in stock. According to Bloomberg, the entire range of M3 chips should be announced tonight.
The 3 processors should benefit from an engraving fineness of 3 nm (where the current M2s are engraved at 5 nm). This should allow these components to offer even more power than their predecessors, while improving the autonomy of devices equipped with them. To put it more simply: the next MacBooks will be more powerful, for longer.
Configuring M3/M3 Pro/M3 Max
The “classic” M3 processor would have 8 cores (in big.LITTLE, that is to say with 4 cores dedicated to raw power and 4 others to more common tasks), while the GPU would have 10. A similar configuration to the M2, but should still offer more power due to the improved engraving fineness.
The M3 Pro would arrive with several configurations, but at least one of them will, a priori, offer 12 CPU cores (still in big.LITTLE) and 18 GPU cores. Higher-end M3 Pros could offer 14 CPU cores and 20 GPU cores.
Finally, the M3 Max would offer 16 cores on its CPU (with 12 dedicated to performance and 4 for less demanding tasks) and 40 on its GPU. Less powerful versions could also offer “only” 32 cores for graphics power. Suffice to say that Apple’s ultra high-end chip risks offering a riot of power (and, incidentally, costing a kidney).
New iMacs and MacBook Pros on the horizon
Beyond the riot of cores, numbers and GHz, announcing the entire family of M3 chips during a single keynote would be a logistical feat for Apple. Many manufacturers are indeed struggling to release 3nm processors quickly enough to meet demand.
These processors should obviously be accompanied by new machines, namely an iMac and MacBook Pros. Apple’s latest “Pro” laptop model was presented barely 10 months ago, but no matter, Apple wants to hit hard for the end of the year, it seems.
Source : Bloomberg
9