[HN Gopher] Snapdragon X Elite benchmarks: Impressive gains over...
___________________________________________________________________
Snapdragon X Elite benchmarks: Impressive gains over M2 and desktop
CPUs
Author : magnio
Score : 79 points
Date : 2023-10-30 15:13 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.notebookcheck.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.notebookcheck.net)
| ZiiS wrote:
| Next years chip with twice the power budget wining a first party
| benchmark is the status quo; it would only be news if this did
| not happen.
| S_A_P wrote:
| It almost reads like a snapdragon x marketing flyer. Is this
| page a legitimate? Reading through the article and scanning a
| few benchmarks I see that it's still behind most of today's
| chips but is in "striking distance". What does that even mean?
| The chip is going to become sentient and attack the
| m2/amd/intel chips and get its performance revenge?
| jandrese wrote:
| I think it means that instead of being 3-4 years behind they
| will only be 2 years behind. It's hard to say though because
| Apple has been a hell of a moving target.
| jorvi wrote:
| > . It's hard to say though because Apple has been a hell
| of a moving target.
|
| Have they?
|
| They were stuck on Intel's incremental schedule for years
| and years, then they made a gigantic leap with the
| M1-series, and it has been incremental again since then.
| Bigger increments than 7th gen > 8th gen Intel, but its a
| bit ridiculous to pretend they're making 8th gen Intel > M1
| leaps every year.
| jandrese wrote:
| The competitors have been making only incremental
| improvements as well, which has left them with just as
| big of a gap year after year.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| It's important to remember that they are 3-4 years ahead
| against ARM competitors (ie mobile). They were the first
| to reach sufficient volume (+ years of planning for SW
| and HW) that their mobile CPU tech could be scaled jump
| to migrate their laptop/desktop offerings and outpace on
| a per watt basis with AMD/Intel (and be at least
| competitive with on an absolute basis).
|
| For example, they have a unified 800GB/s memory bandwidth
| with zero copy sharing between GPU and CPU. That's not
| something anyone else has managed yet. They're not making
| the huge leaps every year, but they're making enough to
| keep the advantage of their previously leap. Their
| previous leap was a result of process node and
| architectural improvements and they're continuing to buy
| up manufacturing capacity from TSMC to retain their
| 6-12month edge on other competitors.
| jorvi wrote:
| They have certainly built an amazing architecture.
|
| I'll say that I stated it rather too miserly, a bit out
| of annoyance from the extreme hyperbole surrounding the
| M-series processors ("its better than an i9 + 3080
| system! Next year it'll beat an i9 + 4090!!").
|
| Funnily enough I plan to switch to an M-series Macbook as
| soon as Asahi Linux is completely out of beta.
| giantrobot wrote:
| I replaced a 16" i9 MacBook Pro with an M1 MacBook Air
| right after it was released. The Air was _at least_ as
| fast as the MBP running full tilt with my workloads. The
| Air has no fan so it 's completely silent and I've rarely
| experienced any thermal throttling on it. The i9 MBP's
| fans would spin up if you looked at it sideways and
| running full out sounded like a jet engine. The Air also
| lasts all day on the battery at a fraction of the weight
| and a fraction of the thickness of the MBP it replaced.
|
| The M-series chips beat a lot of Intel and AMD offerings
| in _some_ form factors. It 's not that the greatest chip
| of all time and there's Intel and AMD offerings that beat
| them in single thread performance or offer more multi
| thread performance at some price points.
|
| At the high end I think Intel and AMD (plus GPU) are more
| competitive with Apple's kit so long as the OEM makes
| nice hardware. At the low end the entry level M2s have
| ridiculous capability compared to x86 machines. Maybe
| Qualcomm will actually be in the running with the
| Snapdragon X if they can ditch the Windows millstone.
| caycep wrote:
| granted, I think maybe more eyes are on this snapdragon
| release as it might have some Apple/Nuvia special sauce
| in this batch. Albeit not sure how motivated Gerald
| Williams and co are to be designing mobile/laptop chips
| again given the whole point of their leaving were to do
| server chips...
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| Apple is doing something interesting but it's not at all
| unclear _how_ they 're doing it:
|
| > outpace on a per watt basis with AMD/Intel (and be at
| least competitive with on an absolute basis)
|
| They're the first on TSMC's new process nodes, so
| whenever a new node comes out, people will compare the
| new Apple chip on a new node to the previous generation
| AMD chip on the previous node. If you compare them this
| way then the newer node outperforms the older one as
| expected. Then AMD releases one on the new node and the
| advantage basically disappears, or is just making
| different trade offs, e.g. selling chips with more cores
| which consequently have a higher TDP in exchange for
| higher multi-thread performance.
|
| Intel hasn't been competitive with either of them on
| power consumption for some time because Intel's
| fabrication is less power efficient than TSMC's.
|
| But if Apple's advantage is just outbidding everyone at
| TSMC, that only lasts until TSMC builds more fabs (the
| lead times for which get shorter as the COVID issues
| subside), or someone else makes a better process.
|
| > For example, they have a unified 800GB/s memory
| bandwidth with zero copy sharing between GPU and CPU.
| That's not something anyone else has managed yet.
|
| It's also not something which is at all difficult to do.
| It's a straightforward combination of two known
| technologies. Integrated GPUs have unified memory and
| discrete GPUs have high memory bandwidth.
|
| There is no secret to attaching high bandwidth memory to
| a CPU with an integrated GPU, it's just a trade off that
| traditionally isn't worth it. CPUs typically have more
| memory than GPUs but if it's unified and you want to use
| the fast memory you're either going to get less of it or
| pay more, and CPU applications that actually benefit from
| that amount of memory bandwidth are uncommon.
|
| One of the rare applications that do benefit from it are
| LLMs, and it's possible that's enough to create market
| demand, but there's no real question of if they can
| figure out how to make that -- everybody knows how. It's
| only a question of if customers want to pay for it.
|
| And what we may see is something better -- high bandwidth
| memory as a unified L4 cache. So then your CPU+iGPU gets
| the amount of HBM traditionally found on a discrete GPU
| and the amount of DRAM traditionally attached to a CPU
| and you get the best of both worlds with no increase in
| cost over a CPU + discrete GPU. But currently nobody
| offers that -- the closest is the Xeon Max which has HBM
| but no integrated GPU.
|
| And none of these are why _Qualcomm_ isn 't competitive
| with Apple -- they're not competitive with AMD or Intel
| either. It's not the fabs or the trade offs. Their
| designs just aren't as good. But all that means is they
| should hire more/better engineers.
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| It looks like it wins even with a smaller power budget. Apple
| is going to have to pull a rabbit out of the hat with the M3
| for it to be competitive.
|
| https://www.xda-developers.com/snapdragon-x-elite-benchmarks...
| shows a 23W Qualcomm processor having almost 50% higher
| multicore performance than an M2 on Geekbench and more than
| doubling the multicore performance on Cinebench.
| officeplant wrote:
| Can't wait for it to be complete trash in Windows and continue to
| suffer the same issues I've had with every snap dragon powered
| windows machine including the devbox 2023. GPU driver will crash
| under heavy web rendering loads (twitter gif heavy threads), It
| will probably be undercooled causing P cores to be kneecapped
| push applications to the E cores as soon as it warms up, and
| never let them go back. Although I will note the MS ARM devbox at
| least was adequately cooled, if poorly vented so this was a rare
| occasion.
|
| On top of that linux support will be non-existent leaving you to
| struggle as microsoft's most underserved user population.
|
| Good luck anyone who makes the dive, even as an ARM enthusiast I
| gave up on qualcomm products as a whole.
| Moral_ wrote:
| The chip already has upstream linux support, the benchmarks
| they showed in their presentation was on 6.5
| wtallis wrote:
| Did they show any GPU benchmarks or otherwise give an
| indication that the Linux support will be relatively full-
| featured? Because what I've seen so far is just a Geekbench
| CPU score on Linux that was significantly higher than the
| Windows score because fan control wasn't working on Linux.
| hmottestad wrote:
| Dunno myself, but I do remember that the company behind the
| initial chip design was targeting the server market, so
| that's probably the reason for Linux support. I kinda doubt
| that the GPU has any Linux support, it's just a regular
| Qualcomm developed GPU.
| tssva wrote:
| "It will probably be undercooled causing P cores to be
| kneecapped push applications to the E cores as soon as it warms
| up, and never let them go back."
|
| It doesn't have any E cores.
| wmf wrote:
| Other thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38069887
| gnabgib wrote:
| AnandTech's article (49 points, 20 comments, 3 hours ago)[0]
| seems like a better source/write-up.
|
| [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38069887
| CoolGuySteve wrote:
| I disagree, this article shows how it compares to their own
| benchmarks.
|
| In particular, you can add a 7840U laptop to the comparisons to
| see how the 23W Qualcomm part compares to the current low power
| AMD CPU with a comparable wattage.
| asicsarecool wrote:
| Framework motherboard please
| hulitu wrote:
| > Thus, it is becoming increasingly clear that the Snapdragon X
| Elite's single-core performance can rival the best of current
| offerings from Intel, AMD, and Apple.
|
| The word "laptop" is missing from this sentence.
|
| And since laptops have soldered cpus i think this would not help
| the adoption of an exotic archirecture with no software support.
| (Supports DirectX and OpenGL - he just forgot to mention the
| numbers).
|
| I would love to see computers other than x86, but, at the moment,
| they are limited to routers, laptops and things like Raspberry or
| Banana Pi.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-10-30 23:01 UTC)