I just upgraded to the top M3 Max CPU from the top M2 Max CPU.
I benchmarked several test suites to compare the machines. The test suites for two different Rails applications were around 10% faster on the M3 Max. A test suite for a Go web application that does significant integration testing in parallel (i.e. multiple complete stacks of database, application server, and browser) improved by around 20%. The extra P-cores help. Miscellaneous other tests and benchmarks were around 7-10% faster.
Didn't notice any difference in normal usage.
So not likely worth the upgrade unless your workload can really make use of the extra cores.
I benchmarked several test suites to compare the machines. The test suites for two different Rails applications were around 10% faster on the M3 Max. A test suite for a Go web application that does significant integration testing in parallel (i.e. multiple complete stacks of database, application server, and browser) improved by around 20%. The extra P-cores help. Miscellaneous other tests and benchmarks were around 7-10% faster.
Didn't notice any difference in normal usage.
So not likely worth the upgrade unless your workload can really make use of the extra cores.