Apple M3 Machine Learning Speed Test | by Daniel Bourke | Jan, 2024

I’ve been using my M1 Pro MacBook Pro 14-inch for the past two years.

I bought the upgraded version with extra RAM, GPU cores and storage to future proof it.

And it hasn’t missed a beat.

But Apple’s latest release of the M3 series got me curious.

I watched the presentation and saw a bunch of graphs about it being their biggest GPU performance leap in years.

Being a machine learning engineer, naturally, this got me curious about how they would perform from a machine learning standpoint.

My M1 Pro is unmatched in day-to-day usage.

I love it.

But I wouldn’t go training larger scale machine learning models on it.

Can the M3 series change this?

I did a bunch of tests to find out.

• Code on GitHub — all of the code I used to setup and run the tests across the machines can be found on GitHub.
• Video walkthrough — I also made a video walkthrough of all the results plus a few tips and recommendations on YouTube.

The following are the machines I tested.

For all of the M3 variants of the MacBook Pro, they were the base model in their class (e.g. an M3 Pro MacBook Pro with no upgrades from the Apple Store).