Apple M3 Max 16-Core vs AMD Ryzen 7 2700

Apple M3 Max 16-Core

The Apple M3 Max (16 Core) is a system on a chip (SoC) from Apple for notebooks that was launched towards the end of 2023. It integrates a new 16-core CPU with 12 performance cores with up to 4.06 GHz and 4 efficiency cores with 2.8 GHz. There is also a slimmed-down 14-core variant with a 30-core GPU.

Thanks to the higher clock rates and architectural improvements, the processor performance is also significantly better than the M2 Max in benchmarks and can keep up with the fastest mobile CPUs (such as a Core i9-13900HX).

The M3 also integrates a new graphics card with dynamic caching, mesh shading and ray tracing acceleration via hardware. In the top model, all 40 cores of the chip are used and support up to 5 displays simultaneously (internal and 4 external).

GPU and CPU can jointly access the shared memory on the package (unified memory). This is available in 48, 64 and 128 GB variants and offers 400 GB/s maximum bandwidth (512 bit bus).

The integrated 16-core Neural Engine has also been revised and now offers 18 TOPS peak performance (compared to 15.8 TOPS in the M2 but 35 TOPS in the new A17 Pro). The video engine now also supports AV1 decoding in hardware. H.264, HEVC and ProRes (RAW) can still be decoded and encoded. Like its predecessor, the Max chip offers two video engines and can therefore encode and decode two streams simultaneously.

Unfortunately, the integrated WLAN only continues to support WiFi 6E (no WiFi 7), unlike the small M3 SoC thunderbolt 4 is also supported (max 40 Gbit/s).

The chip is manufactured in the current 3nm process (N3B) at TSMC and contains 92 billion transistors (+37% vs. Apple M2 Max). Under load, the CPU part consumes up to 56 watts, the chip can use a total of 78 watts.

AMD Ryzen 7 2700

The AMD Ryzen 7 2700 is an eight-core desktop processor that can handle sixteen threads simultaneously thanks to Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT). This technology is equivalent to Intel's Hyper-Threading. Launched in April 2018, the Ryzen 7 2700 is the second fastest Ryzen 7 processor and is much more economical than its flagship sibling. The Ryzen 7 2700 has a 65 W TDP, which is nearly 50% more efficient than the 105 W TDP Ryzen 7 2700 X. This energy efficiency comes at a cost to performance though.

The Ryzen 7 2700 has a base clock speed of 3.2 GHz, which can be boosted by Extended Frequency Range (XFR) up to 4.1 GHz. The power gain is still high in multi-threaded applications, although this is some way off the Ryzen 7 2700X. The Ryzen 7 2700 benefits from AMD's new Zen+ architecture, with a greater number of instructions per cycle (IPC) and higher clock speeds than last year's Zen chips. The Ryzen 7 2700's eight cores are divided into two clusters that are connected by Infinity Fabric, a subset of HyperTransport. Each cluster has its own L3 cache.

The Ryzen 7 2700 has good performance in games. However, if it is operating at a lower base clock because of low TDP, then the Ryzen 7 2700 falls behind the Ryzen 5 2600 in gaming benchmarks. This behaviour could be because many games currently lack multi-core support. Hence, games rely more on clock speed more than core count.

Detailed information, benchmarks and values can be found in our review of the Ryzen 7 2700.