M3 MacBook Air Benchmarks Reveal 20% Performance Uplift Over M2 Models

The first benchmarks of Apple's latest M3 MacBook Air have surfaced on the CPU testing site Geekbench, indicating that the new notebook is approximately 20% faster than its M2 predecessors, which have been around for two years. During its unveiling, Apple claimed that the M3 MacBook Air models offer a 60% performance improvement over the M1 MacBook Air lineup.

It is worth noting that the new MacBook Air models lack a fan for enhanced thermals, a feature present in the M3 MacBook Pro model launched in October 2023 at Apple's "Scary Fast" event.

The new M3 MacBook Air is available in 13-inch and 15-inch variants, both relying on passive cooling. Geekbench results indicate a 20% improvement in single-threaded and multi-core CPU performance compared to the M2 Air models. However, Geekbench also suggests that the performance differential between the M3 and M1 chips is only 30-40%, while Apple claimed an up to 60% improvement, likely due to cherry-picking workloads for certain well-optimised Mac applications.

The M3's most significant gains are expected to come from its GPU, which supports hardware-enabled mesh shading and ray-traced graphics – capabilities that Geekbench does not account for. The new M3 Air models offer up to 24GB of RAM.

Manufactured on TSMC's cutting-edge 3nm process, the M3 chipset is the first PC-grade SoC to utilise this advanced node. It is expected to be compared with Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite chipset, which is likely to debut with Microsoft's upcoming Surface lineup.

The new MacBook Air notebooks start at ₹114,900 for the 13-inch model and ₹134,900 for the 15-inch variant. The older M2 MacBook Air models are now available at ₹104,900 and ₹124,900, respectively.