News Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite for PCs Has 12 Oryon Cores, Tops Out at 4.3 GHz

[bit_user]

Barring a miracle they won't be anywhere near the performance level Qualcomm is claiming here graphics wise. They're comparing with AMD's current top IGP, though with slow DRAM, and have a significant lead. Based on what I've seen DRAM scaling wise the AMD part stands to gain 10-20% performance which means Qualcomm would still be looking at 40-50% more performance. That isn't a gap Intel or AMD will be closing any time soon.

Arrow Lake (or Lunar Lake?) is supposed to go up to 384 EU, which is 3x the size of Meteor Lake's iGPU and 4x the size of the Alder Lake iGPU that Qualcomm is probably comparing against. That's going to be quite the match-up!

What we're seeing here is Nuvia's server core adapted to a laptop format.

Eh, it's taken so long to come to market that it could well be an almost ground-up redesign for laptops.

Qualcomm also doesn't have to compete with Apple in this space just AMD and Intel.

I wouldn't be so sure. Almost everyone has to compete with Apple laptops, to some extent. As long as Apple can steal market share, you have to worry about them. My employer is a big corporate Windows shop, but you can get a Mac there! The camel's nose is already under the tent. If Macs retain or build their lead on battery life and other things, you could easily see their marketshare continue to grow.

They need to have a product that offers real advantages without a price premium which may have impacted their design.

Pfft. This is Qualcomm we're talking about? They priced the Snapdragon 8cx chips like they're Apple, except they seem to have forgotten they're not. They could make some real inroads into the market, if they were willing to start out as both cheaper and better, but I can almost guarantee they will not.

 

[bit_user]

In terms of TFLOP comparisons the graphics capabilities are a little worse than an RX 470, which I feel would be pretty good for a mobile chip, but for a desktop chip, it isn't that impressive. if this kind of performance was in something like a steam deck, that would be impressive. Power draw would probably be too much for something like a steam deck though.

I think power draw should be better than Steam Deck's current SoC, which is an AMD Zen 3 + RDNA2, made on TSMC N6.

 

[thestryker]

Arrow Lake (or Lunar Lake?) is supposed to go up to 384 EU, which is 3x the size of Meteor Lake's iGPU and 4x the size of the Alder Lake iGPU that Qualcomm is probably comparing against. That's going to be quite the match-up!

If that turns out to be true (remember MTL was originally supposedly 192) they're still limited by the 128 bit bus and DRAM speed unless Intel starts mandating speeds. This is one place where Adreno upscaling from mobile is probably an advantage versus downscaling from discrete. Remember even the lowly A380 has more memory bandwidth than LPDDR5X on 128 bit bus running 9600.

Eh, it's taken so long to come to market that it could well be an almost ground-up redesign for laptops.

It's possible, but I doubt it. That's why I'm really excited to see what comes next as this seems to just be a singular SKU.

I wouldn't be so sure. Almost everyone has to compete with Apple laptops, to some extent. As long as Apple can steal market share, you have to worry about them. My employer is a big corporate Windows shop, but you can get a Mac there! The camel's nose is already under the tent. If Macs retain or build their lead on battery life and other things, you could easily see their marketshare continue to grow.

I just mean for their entry into the market. They don't have to swing for the fences with design number one. They just have to provide a clear advantage over their direct competition.

Pfft. This is Qualcomm we're talking about? They priced the Snapdragon 8cx chips like they're Apple, except they seem to have forgotten they're not. They could make some real inroads into the market, if they were willing to start out as both cheaper and better, but I can almost guarantee they will not.

Oh absolutely, and I meant it in the context of Qualcomm and their stupid margins. If they made a chip that cost more they'd raise the price accordingly rather than lower their margin. When I saw the first Surface with one of the 8cx cost basically the same as the Intel ones I laughed.

I expect these to be priced dumb enough that they will only be in $1000+ devices. Unlike the 8cx these may be able to justify that though.

I think power draw should be better than Steam Deck's current SoC, which is an AMD Zen 3 + RDNA2, made on TSMC N6.

*Zen 2

 

[bit_user]

If that turns out to be true (remember MTL was originally supposedly 192) they're still limited by the 128 bit bus and DRAM speed unless Intel starts mandating speeds.

For sure, they'll have to do something innovative about memory bandwidth. Maybe the return of L4 cache or even HBM (though I slightly doubt it).

Don't forget that Intel is already doing on-package LPDDR5X, so maybe they'll scale up to 256-bit, like Apple did?

Intel Demos Meteor Lake CPU with On-Package LPDDR5X

Intel preps Meteor Lake processors with integrated LPDDR5X

www.tomshardware.com

 

[Order 66]

Arrow Lake (or Lunar Lake?) is supposed to go up to 384 EU, which is 3x the size of Meteor Lake's iGPU and 4x the size of the Alder Lake iGPU that Qualcomm is probably comparing against. That's going to be quite the match-up!

Assuming 8 "cores" for each compute unit (execution unit? is there a difference between the terms?) then that would mean 3072 cores total.

 

[JamesJones44]

Not an architecture license. That's only needed if you want to design your own cores. Qualcomm hasn't done that, in their phone SoCs, since the Snapdragon 820 (2015) & 835 (2017). They finished (and then immediately killed) Centriq, their server CPU, in 2018. I've seen the demise of Centriq get blamed on the Broadcom hostile takeover bid. I'm not sure if it's true, but nobody seems to contradict it.

Thanks for that! For some reason I didn't realize/missed that they had stopped designing their own cores.

 

[bit_user]

For some reason I didn't realize/missed that they had stopped designing their own cores.

Yeah, and then a few years later they turned around and spend like $2B, acquiring Nuvia (not to mention lawyers' fees fending off litigation from Apple, over it). Let's hope they keep the Nuvia team happy.

 

[rluker5]

Where'd you hear they're unpatched?

Depends on the phone. : https://www.androidauthority.com/phone-update-policies-1658633/
I've always been cheap with my phones (lower midrange and I keep them for a while) so I likely never saw a patch, but somebody who replaces their phone every two years probably would. And you would be safer still with a Samsung, Google or Apple phone.

The phone industry is not like the pc industry where Windows and Linux will step up and get people patches. If you have something a couple of years old it may likely be in the no support ever again phase. I thought keeping a phone for 5 years and replacing the battery was normal. Lots of phones running Android 12 still work fine, but a lot of those will never see a security update again, so no patch for any hardware security flaws.

So I suppose I would have to amend my statement as older than average phones that are not from Samsung, Apple or Google didn't get patches.

Imagine if Windows 10 was too old to get security updates unless Lenovo or Dell supplied them. It would be if it was Android. One of the many reasons I don't buy things from my phone.

 

[bit_user]

Depends on the phone. : https://www.androidauthority.com/phone-update-policies-1658633/

Ah, okay. So, your point was not that patches hadn't been developed - just that they hadn't necessarily been deployed.