PC Apple put up their newest PC offerings with a new claimed 3nm chip M3

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There is questions about posted performance levels but more interestingly is Apple dropped the price of their entry level laptops. They added new entry level and bigger more powerful high end models. All based on 3nm TSMC produced chips worlds first could be at least a year ahead of competitors in regards to 3nm though Intel did show 4nm chips so who know?

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• Apple announced three new chips, all under the broader M3 product banner. The current generation of chips is the M2.
• There is an entry-level M3, a 40% faster M3 Pro, and a 250% faster M3 Max chip for AI developers and 3D artists.
• Apple says all M3 chips can get up to 22 hours of battery life on a laptop.
• The M3 has a 8 core central processing unit and up to a 10 core graphics processing unit.
• The M3 Pro has a 12 core CPU and an 18 core GPU.
• The M3 Max has a 16 core CPU and as many as 40 cores on its GPU. Apple says it can be used for developing artificial intelligence software.
• Apple says that its current-generation GPUs are 1.8 times as fast as the GPUs on the M2 chips.
• Apple says its CPU cores on the M3 are 15% faster than M2 CPU performance cores for heavy workloads. The M3 processor is 60% faster than its M1 processor, Apple said.
• The new chips are built on a 3 nanometer process, which is currently the most advanced semiconductor manufacturing technology from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.
• Machines with the M3 Max won’t ship until later in November.

New MacBook Pro and iMac models:"

 

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When TSMC announced it had begun production of its next-generation 3nm process at the end of 2022, it was widely known it had only one big customer—Apple. The company reportedly bought almost all of TSMC's first run of 3nm wafers, so it could be the first tech giant in the world to offer this technology to its customers. Now that it's announced its 3nm products for iPhone and Mac, it's becoming clearer just how much Apple had to pay for the privilege of being first in line. According to one analyst, just the tape-out process alone cost the company $1 billion.

Though Apple officially unveiled its first 3nm chip in September with the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max, this past week, it finally unveiled the M3 lineup of SoCs for the iMac and MacBook Pro. Though the two chip families share some design characteristics, the latter are much larger and more complex. For example, the A17 Pro chip in the iPhone 15 Pro is made with 19 billion transistors, whereas the M3 Max SoC has 92 billion transistors, so it's a whole different enchilada.

To create these chips, Apple had to loosen its purse strings considerably. One analyst estimated it coughed up $1 billion just for the final phase of the design process, called the tape-out. This is when the design is finalized, and the photomasks are created to be used in the manufacturing process.