The Snapdragon X Elite's Adreno iGPU
chipsandcheese.com
chipsandcheese.com
For context, there was a lot of hullabaloo a while ago when the Adreno 730 was posting super impressive benchmarks, outpacing Apple’s GPU and putting up a good fight against AMD and NVIDIA’s lower/mid range cards.
Since then, with the Snapdragon X, there’s been a bit of a deflation which has shown the lead flip dramatically when targeting more modern graphics loads. The Adreno now ranks behind the others when it comes to benchmarks that reflect desktop gaming, including being behind Apple’s GPU.
It’ll be interesting to see how Qualcomm moves forward with newer GPU architectures. Whether they’ll sacrifice their mobile lead in the pursuit of gaining ground for higher end gaming.
It's hard to imagine why they'd distract themselves with that, except perhaps with a token small-run demo for pure brand marketing purposes.
Because of Apple's strict vertical integration, there's so much market for them as the de facto manufacturer delivering parts to pretty much every competitor making products that want a high performance/power ratio.
I believe they have three options
1. Say it’s meant to be like an iGPU, and work on supporting dGPUs to complement it.
2. Say that they want to compete with dGPUs/Apple and risk losing their mobile crown. Which is what Apple did in exchange for one design across all products.
3. Say they want to have a split product portfolio. A more desktop focused GPU for Snapdragon X with a more mobile centric one for 8xx
If they can give good enough, on par or better with current iGPUs, with a lower power usage and potentially even fanless, they're going to sell a billion of them. They'll be in every Chromebook in the world.
I agree these likely will take over the sub $1000 market if given the chance but they are shooting at $1500-2000
Perhaps they'll expand into both ends like they do phones, eg the 4xx on the low end and 8xx on the high end.
All their comparisons are to the MacBook Air and mid-high end windows laptops because that’s the market they’re gunning for. These are meant to be $1k-2k devices.
So I tend to agree that being the reference mobile SoC vendor outside of Cupertino is pretty on brand for their absolute top priority. At Qualcomm if it doesn’t make dollars it doesn’t make sense as we used to say.
And good for them! After a brief flirtation with the idea of becoming a pure play CDMA patent troll they seem to have gotten back to their roots and started doing engineering again. It’s a cool company.
haven't google and samsung started making their own socs?
Assuming that a GPU size and node is similar between different GPUs, then different features which require silicon do it at the expense of other features. It’s always a balancing act.
That’s effectively the big rub between NVIDIA and AMD today with raytracing + tensor support vs pure raster+compute throughput.
Apple just went through a major GPU architecture change [1]. They focused a ton on maximizing for AAA game usage and followed the NVIDIA route to bias towards where they think things are going. At least according to the simplified architecture diagrams for both Apple graphics and Adreno, Apple has more raytracing silicon than Adreno.
It also supports stuff that doesn’t require silicon but does have effects on GPU design like mesh shading or their new dynamic caching that improves occupancy for high draw count games with large uber shaders.
Compared to Adreno that focused more on raw triangle throughput instead, but doesn’t scale as well with complexity. It performs much better on mobile benchmarks that fit that usage pattern, but falls behind with desktop benchmarks that follow Apple’s priorities.
[1] https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/tech-talks/111375
If Apple or Qualcomm pull off desktop features in a mobile power envelope then the industry would happily adjust.
The majority of played mobile games would be the same as they are today imho even if you could achieve 4090 performance in that power envelope.
Their entire tiling setup is great for simple mobile games, but (as shown in the article) is also an inefficient approach for desktop games.
64-wide SIMD works well in simple games and offers a FAR better theoretical compute per area, but when things get more complex, it's hard to keep everything filled. This is why Intel is 8-wide, Nvidia is 32-wide, and AMD is 32/32x2/64-wide (and is one reason why the second SIMD didn't improve performance like the theoretical flops said it should).
With the release of the M-series chips, Apple's GPUs stopped ramping up performance as quickly on the simple mobile benchmarks. This is very clear with A17 in Aztec not only falling behind the SD8gen3, but the SD8gen2 too. At the same time, GPU perf/watt has also lagged behind. However, when you switch to something like the somewhat more complex Solar Bay, the Apple GPU pulls ahead.
This is similar to the AMD/Nvidia swap from gaming to hard compute then slowly back to gaming after they split into server and gaming designs.
As it stands today, the only credible names in ARM SOC GPUs seem to be Apple (M chips) & Nvidia (Tegra chips).
[1]: https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2013/09/26/dolphin-emulator-and...
[2]: https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2023/08/13/dolphin-progress-rep...
Kudos to the Dolphin website developers for keeping 10+ years of blogs & hyperlinks fully functional and properly tagged. They always produce great reading material!
I've been out of this space for years, so my knowledge is definitely stale, but have Mali GPUs fallen out?
I just searched and don’t see that.
Are you looking at pure gaming performance and are you sure it’s not going through a translation layer?
To quote Anandtech (https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...)
> Overall, the M1’s GPU starts off very strong here. At both Normal and High settings it’s well ahead of any other integrated GPU, and even a discrete Radeon RX 560X. Only once we get to NVIDIA’s GTX 1650 and better does the M1 finally run out of gas.
But in a general sense the integrated GPU in the M series processors is closer in competition to a low/mid discrete GPU than the integrated GPUs in other brands.
People have been tinkering with L1 cache conditionality since the L1i and L1d split in 1976 but the Qualcomm people are going hard on this and the jury seems out how it’s going to play.
The line between the L1 and the register file has been getting blurrier every year for over a decade and I increasingly have a heuristic around paying the most attention to L2 behavior until the profiles are in but I’m admittedly engaging in alchemy.
Can any serious chip people as opposed to an enthusiastic novice like myself weigh in on how the thinking is shaping up WRT this?
In the GPUs I work on, there’s not really a blurred line between the actual L1 and the register file. There’s not even just one register file. Sometimes you also get an L3!
These kinds of implementation specific details are where GPUs find a lot of their PPA today, but they’re (arguably sadly) usually quite opaque to the programmer or enthusiastic architecture analyst.
That right there is already a reason not to buy this in 2024.
DirectX 12 Ultimate is 4 years old by now, and with DirectX 12 the best it can do is a 10 years old 3D API.
This is basically a GPU for Office work.
> This is basically a GPU for Office work.
As time goes on it feels like native and up-to-date DirectX drivers aren't necessary, even on Windows itself. The era of kowtowing to a d3d9.dll is over; the SPIR-V recompilation era has begun.
This is the easiest way to validate benchmarks across neutral, bloatware-free OS versions (at least the ones supported by that SoC, anyway).
There was a whole comic about design differences when porting desktop style games qnd shaders to mobile (I can't find it for the life of me) which was a pretty good beginner's guide to porting that stuck with me.
This one from arm? https://interactive.arm.com/story/the-arm-manga-guide-to-the...
If they would compare it iwth an Apple iGPU, they'd be comparing two things: the hardware AND the OS, which makes it less clear what is contributing to your benckmark results.
Apple Silicon hardware can run Linux (with unofficial GPU support as of late, although still lacking support for the NPU), and official support for Linux on Snapdragon laptop platforms is supposedly in the works. So we should be able to do a proper comparison as soon as official support is added for both platforms as part of a single mainline kernel release.
If they had a benchmark result that showed a big win over Apple's design, it would be at the top row of the chart.
The Intel Meteor Lake Arc iGPU The AMD Ryzen Radeon iGPU
Apple are pretty much the only major SoC company who don’t brand the CPU and GPU independently
Qualcomm bought Imageon from AMD in 2009. Sure, they've done some work, made some things somewhat better. But hearing that the graphics architecture is woefully out of date, with terrible compute performance is ghastly unsurprisingly. Trying to see thing thing run games is going to be a sad sad sad story. And that's only 50% the translation layers (which would be amazing if this were Linux and not a Windows or Android device).