Apple has released new Macs powered by M3 chips, showing they are embracing AI through custom hardware.¹⁷⁷ The M3 Max chip targets AI/ML developers with its powerful GPU stack.

What’s going on here?

Apple’s news M3 chips have new GPUs optimized for AI, up to 2.5x faster than M1.

What does that mean?

The new M3 chips have a new GPU architecture with a feature Apple calls dynamic caching. Dynamic caching allocates GPU memory adaptively in real-time, increasing the utilization of the GPU. The new neural engine is 60% faster, speeding up ML.

The M3 Max has a 16-core CPU and 40-core GPU supporting 128GB of unified memory. Apple claims that’ll allow developers to work with models with billions of parameters.

Apple is keeping pace with AI-focused offerings from rivals like Qualcomm. Qualcomm made a similar claim this month with their Snapdragon X Elite of being able to run a 13B model on-device.

Why should I care?

If you use graphics/ML apps, the new Macs will bring meaningful speed improvements. If you’re a developer, Apple's platform is now more compelling for generative AI projects needing local compute.

And there’s the obvious answer to why should you care: because it’s APPLE.