Don’t get us wrong, the numbers are an improvement on the M2, but they are not really that significantly different.

The numbers show a processor whose higher CPU performance is just an increase in clock speed over the M2 and has nothing to do with engineering genius. In fact, the CPU core designs are a bit of a snooze.

Here are the benchmark numbers:

MacBook Pro with M2

Clock speed: 3.49GHz

Single-core: 2587

Multi-core: 9627

MacBook Pro with M3

Clock Speed: 4.05GHz

Single-core: 3030

Multi-core: 11694

This means that the M3 has a maximum clock speed 16 per cent higher than the M2. The single-core CPU performance score is about 17 per cent higher, and the multi-core performance is about 21 per cent higher. Those are similar gains to the M2 over the M1, which saw clock speed boost of 3.5GHz instead of 3.2GHz.

When all the cores are at work, the efficiency cores, which Apple claimed were 30 per cent faster than the M2’s, bring the score up to a “blistering” five per cent improvement over the increase in raw clock speed.

To make matters worse, the M3 seems to owe most of its performance gains to TSMC’s 3nm process and the higher clock speeds it affords in the same overall power profile rather than anything special from Jobs’ Mob.