Apple M3 and M3 Pro Performance Analysis: Should Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm be worried?

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Apple M3 and M3 Pro Performance Analysis: Should Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm be worried?

This launch is made even more interesting due to the pending onslaught of competition coming the PC space from Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm. Only days prior to the Apple announcement, Qualcomm had shown the Snapdragon X Elite SoC that will come in 2024, making some significant claims of performance relative to the best from its rivals. Heading out to my local retailer on Tuesday I picked up a pair of the new MacBook Pro laptops to do some testing and get a feel for how well these new devices compare to other systems powered by Intel and AMD, as well as my own M1 Pro-based MacBook Pro.

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Apple M3 chip announcement leaves doors open for competition

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Apple M3 chip announcement leaves doors open for competition

At the heart of all the new MacBook Pro laptops is a series of M3 processors, for the first time announced and available in the same window. It has been less than a year since Apple launched the M2 Pro and M2 Max CPUs, and only four months since we saw the M2 Max released. This is a very fast cadence for a whole new family of processors and probably indicates that sales of that generation weren’t living up to expectations.

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Snapdragon X Elite Rivals Best CPUs in Single Thread Performance

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Snapdragon X Elite Rivals Best CPUs in Single Thread Performance

Last week during its annual Snapdragon Summit held in Maui, Qualcomm dropped a bomb on the computing world with the announcement of the Snapdragon X Elite processor, a new SoC targeted at the notebook PC going squarely after the likes of Intel, Apple, and AMD. You’ll no doubt find a lot of articles posting this morning that summarize a collection of about six different benchmarks that the press was able to witness being run (no true hands on), but I wanted to focus on one particular set of results of interest to me.

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New Qualcomm laptop chips will pressure Intel, AMD in 2024

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New Qualcomm laptop chips will pressure Intel, AMD in 2024

Earlier this week I published a piece here on MarketWatch describing the coming interest and marketing dynamics in the chips landscape centered around the idea of client AI, or AI processing that runs locally on a device like a laptop or a smartphone, rather than in the cloud. Now this week, during the company’s annual technology summit, Qualcomm has taken the wraps off an interesting combination of products paired with some eye-opening claims. These new products have the capability to shift the balance of power in the PC space.

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AMD is gaining ground on Intel faster than analysts had thought

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AMD is gaining ground on Intel faster than analysts had thought

Sales of AMD’s new Ryzen processor for consumer PCs may be gaining more ground than many investors and market analysts have been predicting. One of the bigger hardware resellers in Europe, Germany’s MindFactory, an online and physical retailer, makes sales data public and it has been compiled to show the changes in unit sales and revenue comparing AMD to Intel. Starting with March of this year, the launch of the first AMD Ryzen processors, the shift at this retailer has been astonishing.

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Intel increases laptop performance to prepare for coming fight with AMD, Qualcomm

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Intel increases laptop performance to prepare for coming fight with AMD, Qualcomm

Intel is taking an aggressive stance with this release, doubling the processor core count from two to four, essentially doubling the amount of computing that each processor will be able to perform in the power restraints of the laptop segment. Because a notebook has to operate with limited power consumption and heat creation to stay inside a standard form factor, balancing performance and power draw is of critical importance. Intel is placing a bet with the 8th Generation Core products that the added processing capability will be used more effectively by software going forward, and that it can offer that capability without sacrificing the vital performance of higher clock rates needed by today’s applications and operating systems.

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