Computing News
Apple MacBook Pro 16-Inch Vs. Samsung Galaxy Book3 Ultra: Head-To-Head
Dylan Martin
Samsung is looking to challenge Apple’s latest 16-inch MacBook Pro with the new and powerful Galaxy Book3 Ultra. CRN gives a breakdown of how the two premium laptop workhorses compare, from the CPU, GPU and memory, to the storage, display, expansion ports and other key specs.
The CPU And GPU
Like other Mac computers from the past few years, Apple’s 16-inch MacBook Pro comes with an Arm-based system-on-chip (SoC) that was designed in house. This SoC consists of a CPU, a GPU, a Neural Engine, unified memory, cache and a fabric that allows those components to communicate.
The 16-inch MacBook Pro released in 2023 comes with one of two souped-up versions of Apple’s second-generation M2 SoC: the M2 Pro or M2 Max. The performance cores of the M2 Pro and M2 Max reportedly have a clock frequency of up to 3.7GHz.
The M2 Pro comes with a 12-core CPU, which is split between eight performance cores and four efficiency cores. It also has a 19-core GPU, a 16-core Neural Engine and a 200GB/s memory bandwidth.
The M2 Max comes with the same CPU and Neural Engine, but it has a beefier GPU, with options for 30-core and 38-core configurations, as well as double the memory bandwidth at 400GB/s.
Samsung’s Galaxy Book3 Ultra, on the other hand, comes with either an Intel Core i7-13700H or the higher-end Intel Core i9-13900H for the CPU and one of two choices for a discrete GPU: Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 4050 or GeForce RTX 4070.
The Intel Core i7-13700H comes with 14 cores: six performance cores and eight efficient cores. Its performance cores have a base frequency of 2.4GHz and a maximum turbo boost frequency of 5GHz.
The Intel Core i9-13900H comes with the same core count and core ratio. Its performance cores have a base frequency of 2.6GHz and a maximum turbo boost frequency of 5.4GHz.
Both CPUs come with several technologies, including Intel Deep Learning Boost, Intel Threat Detection Technology and an Intel Gaussian and Neural Accelerator.
The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4050 comes with 2,560 CUDA cores, a boost clock range of 1,605-2,370MHz, 6GB of GDDR6 memory and a 96-bit wide memory interface.
The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 comes with 4,608 CUDA cores, a boost clock range of 1,230-2,175MHz, 8GB of GDDR6 memory and a 128-bit wide memory interface.
Both the GeForce RTX 4050 and 4070 use Nvidia’s latest Ada Lovelace architecture, and they come with third-generation ray tracing cores and fourth-generation tensor cores.
