High-powered M3 Pro chip for Apple MacBook Pro now in testing, report claims

Apple is expected to announce new Macs with M3-series chips in the future and a new report suggests that Apple is now testing an M3 Pro for a future MacBook Pro update.

If the report is accurate the M3 Pro will feature more cores than the M2 Pro and M1 Pro that came before it, with the MacBook Pro thought to be in testing ahead of an expected 2024 release. The machine in testing is said to be running macOS 14, a software update that isn't expected to ship to the public until this September.

The latest report comes via Bloomberg's Mark Gurman and his weekly Power On newsletter. Gurman believes that Apple is now testing the chip based on data collected by an App Store developer that has been shared with him.

According to the report, the M3 Pro being tested currently sports 12 CPU cores, two more than the M2 Pro that is now available. It is thought that the increase comes in the form of two additional power-efficient cores bringing the number to six. There will be six high-performance cores as is the case now.

Other upgrades include the use of 18 GPU cores, up from the 16 of the M2 Pro, and support for up to 36GB of RAM - a boost over the previous 16GB limitation. All of these figures are for the base Pro chips, however. There have been and will likely continue to be upgraded versions with more cores available in the future.

The new M3-series chips are expected to be powered by 3nm technology that will allow Apple to squeeze more cores into a single chip without making it huge in the process - something that is vital when building a laptop like the MacBook Pro.

Gurman believes that Apple will ship some M3-series machines either later this year or in early 2024, but it's likely that the new MacBook Pros with M3 Pro and M3 Mac chips will have to wait until 2024.