But were they doing equal workloads that were both using lots of memory?
Because for light workloads, of course a modern faster chip that sips power is going to run faster and cooler than a slower space heater from Intel. Nothing to do with the amount of RAM unless you're significantly exceeding the amount of available RAM.
In normal usage you'd never notice the speed difference. The 256GB chip is still fast. When swapping, latency of the underlying storage device is what really makes the difference and latency is pretty much the same for these chips.
So how much does 128GB of LPDDR5X cost a manufacturer since you seem to be an expert on pricing?
Has Apple deliberately nerfed the M3 Pro CPU? And for what reason?
From Apple's slides starting at 10:29:
M3 = 35% faster CPU than M1; 20% faster than M2
M3 Pro = 20% faster CPU than M1 Pro; No comparison to M2 Pro was given! 🤔
M3 Max = 80% faster than M1 Max; 50% faster than M2 Max
When Apple announced the M2 Pro they claimed it was 20% faster than M1 Pro. So are we to assume M3 Pro has no performance improvement this gen?
They've reduced the number of performance cores from eight to six, and as per the OP memory bandwidth at 150GB/sec is lower than the 200GB/sec of the M1 Pro.
It seems reducing the number of performance cores in favour of efficiency cores has eliminated any performance uplift M3 Pro had over M2 Pro.
Have Apple deliberately nerfed M3 Pro?
From Apple's slides:
M3 = 35% faster CPU than M1; 20% faster than M2
M3 Pro = 20% faster CPU than M1 Pro; ??% faster than M2 Pro - No comparison shown, I wonder why?
M3 Max = 80% faster than M1 Max; 50% faster than M2 Max
When Apple announced the M2 Pro they claimed it was 20% faster than M1 Pro. So are we to assume M3 Pro has no performance improvement this gen?
They've reduced the number of performance cores from eight to six, and memory bandwidth at 150GB/sec is lower than the 200GB/sec of the M1 Pro.
It's nice, but I prefer space grey and it's disappointing they got rid of that
Professional apps like logic Pro are native apps. Many people use Electron shite like Spotify and Slack in addition to their web browser. These apps will happily use 2GB RAM each just to perform basic tasks. Open a few Google Docs tabs and your browser will be eating 8GB for itself easily. Now you're swapping like crazy. A small amount of swap activity won't be noticable, but if you're exceeding your available memory by multiple gigabytes the machine will start to slow down.