[HN Gopher] The Snapdragon X Elite's Adreno iGPU
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The Snapdragon X Elite's Adreno iGPU
Author : pella
Score : 155 points
Date : 2024-07-04 21:33 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (chipsandcheese.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (chipsandcheese.com)
| dagmx wrote:
| It's been interesting seeing the difference in architecture play
| out in benchmarks.
|
| 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.
| swatcoder wrote:
| > 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.
| dagmx wrote:
| Well it depends which space they want to be taken seriously
| in. Currently the 741 is very poor when compared to any dGPU
| or Apple. It only favourably compares to iGPUs.
|
| 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
| silisili wrote:
| I think it's going to be 3, but a split between mobile and
| laptop/desktop without any concern for competing with
| dGPUs. It makes no sense at all for them to.
|
| 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.
| hypercube33 wrote:
| They aren't gunning for Chromebook deployments...these
| are currently in business laptop models and AMD may have
| already beaten them in all fronts on some of these per
| dollar other than ultralight and video playback duration.
| Lenovo has a A model that can do 16 hours and light
| gaming. more importantly it runs x86 apps full speed.
|
| I agree these likely will take over the sub $1000 market
| if given the chance but they are shooting at $1500-2000
| silisili wrote:
| Interesting. Seems like a huge missed opportunity there,
| as those outsell everything else by quite a margin.
|
| Perhaps they'll expand into both ends like they do
| phones, eg the 4xx on the low end and 8xx on the high
| end.
| RussianCow wrote:
| Presumably the margins on Chromebook are terrible
| compared to those of mid to high end laptops. I don't
| blame them for wanting to start with the higher margin
| market and eventually work down.
| dagmx wrote:
| They aren't fighting for Chromebook territory with this
| though.
|
| 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.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Chromebooks are basically the US school systems, Google
| employees, and little else.
| HeWhoLurksLate wrote:
| IIRC, on the LTT video on the topic they mentioned that
| there were like 8 extra PCIe lanes that could
| _theoretically_ get run to a dGPU
| benreesman wrote:
| I grew up in San Diego and at the time being involved with
| technology meant living in Qualcomm's shadow in one way or
| another.
|
| 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.
| a-dub wrote:
| > 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.
|
| haven't google and samsung started making their own socs?
| InDubioProRubio wrote:
| I think there is a market for a dual-world architecture, with
| loads of dark silicon in a low battery setting (and suffering
| performance being acceptable) and a high power mode, that is
| able to compete with regular desktop gpu architectures.
| djmips wrote:
| The Mobile lead and gaining ground for higher end gaming are
| aligned in many areas so you have to do both.
| dagmx wrote:
| In some areas sure, but it's really down to what you're
| dedicating silicon to in terms of capabilities.
| jayd16 wrote:
| How so? I'm fairly confused about what you're implying. Is
| Apple sacrificing mobile capabilities for better desktop
| capability, for example?
| dagmx wrote:
| Yes.
|
| 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
| jayd16 wrote:
| I think the tail is wagging the dog here. Those mobile
| workloads are tuned towards what currently works.
|
| If Apple or Qualcomm pull off desktop features in a
| mobile power envelope then the industry would happily
| adjust.
| dagmx wrote:
| I think that assumes that most games are targeting higher
| end graphics and are held back.
|
| 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.
| hajile wrote:
| HALF of X1's compute is F16 only which is absolutely wasted
| silicon for most desktop games.
|
| 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.
| LegitShady wrote:
| To me it seems as if the selling points of these latest
| snapdragon chips is high efficiency/battery life and
| competitive performance, so given the efficiency angle it makes
| less sense to try to make gaming machines out of them right
| now. Maybe in the future there will be a gaming oriented
| snapdragon less concerned about battery life.
| chaorace wrote:
| I'm not surprised the Adreno numbers didn't hold up as well as
| the rest of the Snapdragon benchmarks. Back in 2013 the Dolphin
| team blogged about their terrible experiences with the Adreno
| drivers and vendor support[1]. Ten years later in 2023, the
| same team blogged about how those same continuing issues led
| them to completely replace the official Adreno driver with a
| userland alternative[2].
|
| 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!
| eropple wrote:
| _> As it stands today, the only credible names in ARM SOC
| GPUs seem to be Apple (M chips) & Nvidia (Tegra chips)._
|
| I've been out of this space for years, so my knowledge is
| definitely stale, but have Mali GPUs fallen out?
| dagmx wrote:
| Mali has decent coverage. The pixel phones use them and so
| do a lot of mediatek based low-mid range devices.
| segasaturn wrote:
| Is there any reason why these ARM iGPUs are so much worse than
| iGPUs from Intel and AMD? My 11th gen Intel CPU's Xe graphics
| completely outpaces my M1 Mac's and something like a Ryzen 5
| 5600G destroys both.
| dagmx wrote:
| I'm curious what benchmark you're looking at. The M1 is a
| very competitive iGPU that is competitive with an Nvidia
| 1650.
|
| 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.
| segasaturn wrote:
| No benchmarks, just based on personal usage. I think I
| found the issue after posting that comment though, which is
| macOS's unhelpful deprecation of openGL support. The games
| that I play on macOS used OpenGL and will probably never
| implement Metal which is a shame. They were Apple Silicon
| native though, no translation. Games in question are
| Factorio and RuneScape.
| dagmx wrote:
| Ah yeah it's possible individual games do perform poorly.
|
| 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.
| smusamashah wrote:
| That's a mouthful of a name
| dagmx wrote:
| Not really any more than any other brand.
|
| 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
| bigyikes wrote:
| "Ultimately, it comes down to taste." - Steve Jobs
| pmontra wrote:
| Apple build GPUs for their own hardware and nothing else.
| They could even do without names, it's just another
| inevitable component that's inside the box.
| gary_0 wrote:
| Re: the manual driver updates. Recently I put a clean Win11
| install on an ASUS Meteor Lake laptop for someone, and Windows
| downloaded and installed all the latest drivers automatically
| (along with a bunch of fresh bloatware, natch). Maybe Qualcomm is
| working with Microsoft so their drivers will get updated the same
| way?
| LegitShady wrote:
| I assume they are given the launch of snapdragon copilot
| laptops, and your witnessing it get drivers from windows
| update.
| daviddever23box wrote:
| Yes - and it is certainly possible to export the "final", up-
| to-date set of drivers via DISM, then build an orthogonal set
| that you can recursively install via a single one-click
| pnputil batch file in Audit Mode (Ctrl-Shift-F3 at the top of
| OOBE).
|
| This is the easiest way to validate benchmarks across
| neutral, bloatware-free OS versions (at least the ones
| supported by that SoC, anyway).
| benreesman wrote:
| "In Adreno tradition, Adreno X1's first level cache is a
| dedicated texture cache. Compute accesses bypass the L1 and go to
| the next level in the cache hierarchy. It's quite different from
| current AMD, Nvidia, and Intel GPU architectures, which have a
| general purpose first level cache with significant capacity. On
| prior Adreno generations, the GPU-wide L2 cache would have to
| absorb all compute accesses. Adreno X1 takes some pressure off
| the L2 by adding 128 KB cluster caches."
|
| 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?
| rys wrote:
| In practice, what gets labelled as the L1 cache in a GPU
| marketing diagram or 3rd party analysis might well not be that
| first level of a strict cache hierarchy. That means it's hard
| to do any kind of cross-vendor or cross-architecture comparison
| about what they are or how they work. They're highly
| implementation dependent.
|
| 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.
| perdomon wrote:
| How soon can I buy a handheld console with one of these inside,
| and can it run God of War?
| 3abiton wrote:
| Apparently the Minisforum V3 is aiming for that market.
| Although not super great on battery autonomy.
| izacus wrote:
| There's plenty of consoles using AMD SoCs that perform better
| than this and run God of War. Get one of those.
| mirsadm wrote:
| With my own use case I've noticed very poor compute shader
| performance on the Snapdragon GPUs. Even worse the drivers are
| completely unpredictable. The same shader will sometimes run 2x
| slower for seemingly no good reason at all. I didn't realise
| games these days relied so much on compute shaders. It's no
| suprise it doesn't perform as well as it should.
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| ARM remains a shitty backwater of unsupportable crap ass nonsense
| being thrown over the wall.
|
| 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).
| rubymamis wrote:
| Why is there no comparison with Apple's iGPU?
| nomercy400 wrote:
| Because you cannot compare between an Apple's iGPU and this
| chip, while using the same software stack. Because you cannot
| buy a laptop with this chip and use MacOS.
|
| 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.
| nuccy wrote:
| Generally this is a correct argument - to compare hardware
| one needs to use the same OS/software stack. But the argument
| works the other way around also, if there is no identical
| software stack possible does it really matter how raw
| hardware compares? The end user running a game or an
| application would experience hardware+OS rather than just
| hardware.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > Because you cannot compare between an Apple's iGPU and this
| chip, while using the same software stack.
|
| 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.
| mbs159 wrote:
| They would have to run the same software, e.g. install Linux on
| both machines.
| criddell wrote:
| If I had to bet, I would say it's because they don't beat
| Apple.
|
| 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.
| luyu_wu wrote:
| This is a hardware deepdive by a couple of uni students and
| enthusiasts... Some people are interested in things that aren't
| as shallow as fluctuating performance leads !
| elabajaba wrote:
| A lot of their testing is running custom OpenCL and Vulkan
| code, both of which are essentially unsupported on macOS
| (moltenvk exists, but kinda sucks and adds overhead that would
| make the comparisons invalid anyways).
| jeroenhd wrote:
| I wonder if there's performance being left on the table because
| of the way programs and games are designed. It's no secret
| Qualcomm's mobile chips will run like shit when you try to use
| desktop code on them, because they're designed differently. I
| wonder if we're seeing aspects of that here. It would explain why
| Qualcomm convinced their press team of impressive numbers that
| nobody in the real world has been able to replicate.
|
| 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.
| mandarax8 wrote:
| > There was a whole comic about design differences when porting
| desktop style games qnd shaders to mobile
|
| This one from arm? https://interactive.arm.com/story/the-arm-
| manga-guide-to-the...
| jeroenhd wrote:
| That's the one! Guess it came directly from ARM, no wonder I
| couldn't find it.
| pjmlp wrote:
| > DirectX 12 Ultimate: Disabled
|
| 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.
| cubefox wrote:
| Most games still don't use DX12 Ultimate features. Some use
| some ray tracing, but as the article says, this is expensive
| and should be left off for laptop devices anyway. As for mesh
| shaders, there is currently one (1) game I know of that uses
| them. Alan Wake part 2. I think the other features like sampler
| feedback are also not really used in practice.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Yeah, but I don't buy hardware for what I can do today with
| technology from years ago, rather for something that lasts 5
| to 10 years.
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| Depends on what you want to do. This GPU is impressive for
| a thin and light laptop with long battery life. It
| obviously doesn't compare well to large power hungry
| dedicated GPUs.
| pjmlp wrote:
| As mentioned on my original comment,
|
| > This is basically a GPU for Office work.
| cubefox wrote:
| But why would anyone need a GPU that can run Baldur's
| Gate 3 for office work...
| pjmlp wrote:
| That is why this is the only thing this GPU is good for.
| talldayo wrote:
| If it supports Vulkan 1.2, then it basically supports most
| of DX12 as well. Very famously Intel's ARC GPUs had
| terrible DirectX drivers, but good enough Vulkan support
| that DXVK simply ran better: https://youtu.be/wktbj1dBPFY
|
| 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.
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| DirectX 12 not ultimate still supports most (every?) every game
| out there. As for "GPU for office work", that's a question left
| up to specific in-game benchmarks.
| bhouston wrote:
| Nice! What are the comparisons with Apple's you in the latest
| M-series chips?
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(page generated 2024-07-05 23:01 UTC)