Apple MacBook Pro Users Can “Easily work with … 8K”
Apple updated its MacBook Pro and 24″ iMac models with new ‘M3’ processors in a virtual worldwide event. The new processors (M3, M3 Pro and M3 Max) use 3nm technology (2 million transistors in the area of a human hair!) and will be available next week (M3 and M3 Pro) or in November (M3 Max).
The new processors boost performance and reduce power consumption and are said to be 40% to 80% faster than the M1 chips and up to 50% faster than the M2 series. At the same time, power consumption is down – by up to 50% They have a new hardware-based dynamic cache architecture to boost the GPU performance as well as new accelerated mesh shading and hardware ray tracing. Those features will particularly boost graphics and gaming.
On the video front, there is now hardware AV1 decoding which will mean reduced power consumption when viewing streaming video and the M3 Max has dual ProRes engines for encoding and decoding. Apple said that the M3 Max allows video editors to:
“Easily work with multiple streams of 8K video in Premiere Pro”
The M1 Max also supports up to 128GB of unified memory for faster video editing.
There is no change to the external display support with 8K supported via HDMI on the M3 Pro and M3 Max models. The Thunderbolt 4 outputs remain limited to 6K as there is no adoption of Thunderbolt 5, yet.
Apple was very keen to promote the boost to performance especially compared to the Intel-based previous models.
The new 24″ iMac has a display with “4.5K” (4480 x 2520) resolution and uses the M3 chip. External support is only using Thunderbolt 3.
