MacBook Air M3 chips : Apple unveiled the M3 series of chips at its “Scary Fast” event in October. We’ve seen them in various form factors like the MacBook Pro and iMac, but yesterday Apple launched the M3-powered MacBook Airs in both 13” and 15” sizes. The unique thing here is that the chip only runs on passive cooling, which leads to a different performance profile.

So, how fast is it? The first results have already surfaced in Geekbench’s database and show a nearly 20% increase in both single and multi-core CPU performance compared to the M2-powered Airs. Compared to the original M1 Air, the difference is in the 30-40% range.

M3 MacBook Air Versus: M2 15” M3 MacBook Air Versus: M2 13” M3 MacBook Air Versus: M1 13”

M3 MacBook Air Versus: M2 15” • M2 13” • M1 13”

However, the M3 generation’s main improvement lies in the GPU, and that’s something that Geekbench doesn’t test. But did we mention cooling – the Air lacks the MacBook Pro’s active cooling. How much difference does it make?

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For the short duration of the Geekbench test, the answer is not much (at least when compared to the same base M3 chip). The difference appears to be within the margin of error. Of course, that won’t be the case for continuous workloads, but you’re not buying the Air for 3D rendering or video editing. MacBook Air M3 chips

Pro models are also available with M3 Pro and M3 Max chips, for those looking for more compute power.

The MacBook Air M3 starts at $1,100 for the 13” model and $1,300 for the 15” model. In both cases this comes with an 8-core CPU, 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, although the GPU is different – 8-core on the 13” model and 10-core on the 15” one. For comparison, the M2-powered 13” Air starts at $1,000 with an 8-core CPU and GPU and 8/256GB of memory.

Apple’s new 3 nm M3 chips bring major GPU improvements

Apple’s big event saw the arrival of the company’s new chips for personal computers – the M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max. They will be available in the newly introduced 14” and 16” MacBook Pro laptops, and the entry-level variant is also the 24” iMac.

The biggest improvement is the GPU, which aims to improve the performance of professional applications and gaming. It will support hardware-accelerated ray tracing and mesh shading, a first for Apple silicon. Another first is the 3 nm process, as Cupertino is the first to implement the technology in chips for personal computers. MacBook Air M3 chip