Final Words
Qualcomm's Snapdragon 800 is quite possibly its most ambitious SoC to date. The goal? To drive absolute performance while maintaining power efficiency. While Snapdragon 600 was clearly about delivering evolutionary gains in performance, Snapdragon 800 intends to compete with ARM's Cortex A15 and Intel's Bay Trail platform.
On the CPU performance front, Snapdragon 800's 2.3GHz Krait 400 cores appear to do hold their own quite well against ARM's Cortex A15. In some cases ARM holds the advantage, while in others the higher clocked Krait 400 takes the lead. We still have the question of power to answer, but Qualcomm bets it can deliver A15-like performance without A15-like power thanks to the 28nm HPM process at its foundry partners.
Qualcomm didn't have any power demos setup, so power analysis and battery life performance will have to come at a later date, but the claim is better performance at equivalent platform power as Snapdragon 600.
On the GPU side, we have a new king. Adreno 330 delivers huge performance improvements over Adreno 320 and everything else we've tested thus far. Snapdragon 800 is the new benchmark to beat. It's very clear to me why many tablet designs scheduled for later this year are based on Snapdragon 800 silicon.
Qualcomm didn't have any power demos setup, so power analysis and battery life performance will have to come at a later date, but the claim is better performance at equivalent platform power as Snapdragon 600.
The thing is power consumption numbers are only a part of the equation, I've said this before but I'll reiterate that for a smartphone the display will eat roughly 70% of the battery whilst the Wifi/3G radios et al will use 10% or more leaving the actual SoC with consumption anywhere between a sixth to a third, depending upon the usage pattern. For tablets the SoC will not use more than 40% of total power at anytime for avg users so I personally believe Qualcomm's claim of similar level of efficiency wrt Snapdragon 600.No much to see here without actual power consumption figures.
I think its good we a s800 thread. Thanx. The new ARM Cpu is by far the most interesting cpu on the market, while we still tend to discuss utterly unimportant 5 GHz cpus.
Qualcomm continues to surprise me. The GPU part is very healthy, and i judge from the Great Ewqulizer that the new Atoms with eg. 4 or 8 EU and lower MHz will be far behind from day one even from this product on the GPU side.
Intel simply needs a more effective GPU side. SDP talk dont help on a professional OEM market. Results does.
And Qualcomms pipeline is healthy continuing with new product every half year. If one wonder why Qualcomms market cap is so high as Intel - look at this product. Super high performance in a single chip solution. Delivering what the market need - profit for the OEM.
According to Intel slides @ Computex (http://files.shareholder.com/downlo...9b220d3/Hermann_Eul_Computex_2013_keynote.pdf see page 28), Bay Trail will perform 4x better than Clover Trail in GLBenchmark 2.5 Egypt HD. That would be about 28-32fps, which is roughly the same performance that Clover Trail+ gives today:
Certainly won't deny the fact that the Adreno 330 looks poised to have the 3D performance crown, but I wouldn't be quite so pessimistic with respect to Bay Trail projections. The Z2760 gets a score of 12 fps in GLBenchmark 2.5 - http://www.techinferno.com/2013/06/08/samsung-ativ-smart-pc-500t-intel-z2760-review/7/ - so 4x the performance would put it up to 48 fps. Which isn't too bad when you consider that there are currently only 3 higher ARM scores than that in the GFXBench database (highest being NVIDIA's Project Shield at 54.5 fps... which at 18.3 fps in GLBenchmark 2.7 means it still gets handily beat by Adreno 330.)
Qualcomm graphics still stuck at DX feature level 9.3 and supports OpenGL ES 3.0 only (assuming Adreno 330 is an overclocked Adreno 320), means feature wise Adreno 330 is just a subset of Intel's Gen 7 graphics which fully supports DX 11 and OpenGL 4.0.
And at these performance levels DX11 is close to useless even when running Windows.
DX11 makes less sense indeed (as its main features are tessellation and GPGPU compute), but DX10 is major improvement over DX9. It introduces a lot of new features. For example, Adreno still lacks geometry shaders. Basically using DX10 instead of DX9 you can get either better performance with the same picture quality or same performance with better picture quality.
The review number you quoted is the onscreen score. Onscreen is affected by native resolution, in this case the tablet is running at 1366x768 instead of 1920x1080 used in the offscreen test. In other words, it's the wrong number.
See here:
https://gfxbench.com/device.jsp?D=Samsung%20ATIV%20Smart%20PC%20500T
The right one for comparison is the 7FPS number. I've seen some numbers as high as 8FPS. Hence the 28-32 number I gave.
Such wasn't clear from the review, but 12 fps matched up with where SGX 545 should be at Z2760's 533 MHz frequency in comparison to Z2460's SGX 540 at a 400 MHz frequency - gfxbench for Atom with SGX 540 @ 400 MHz. But you're quite correct that the number I linked was incorrect.
Oh, and as for power... yes, tablets have higher tolerances, however I wouldn't be at all surprised if Adreno 330 was drawing over 4 watts to achieve that level of performance, more likely somewhere in the 6-8 watt range. (Based on the GPU power usage in Anandtech's x86 vs ARM power usage article - Mali T-604 uses around 3.5 watts for 43 fps in GLBenchmark 2.5 while Adreno 225 uses around 1 watt for 14.5 fps on the android side while Tegra 3 uses around 1.75 watts for 11.5 fps and SGX 545 uses 0.75 watts for 7 fps on the windows side which isn't as useful for this extrapolation.)
Agreed. And it's likely that unlike PowerVR there won't be a boost to performance under Android compared to Windows. 28-32 fps seems a reasonable expectation when compared to ultrabook HD4000 at ~85 fps.I agree, the numbers for CT on Win 8 look lower than they should be and bad drivers could be to blame. But unless there's a universal penalty for glbench 2.5 running on Win 8 instead of Android then it shouldn't really matter why the CT score is as bad as it is, only that it's a baseline for estimating the 28-32 or so score that BT is going to get. This is simply not a competitive score.
Well, Adreno 225 gets 4.6 fps in GLBenchmark 2.7, so Adreno 330 is roughly 5.7x the performance. Of course comparing against the older architecture means it's likely the 330 is more efficient, making up for the increased frequency. So yeah, 6W is the more likely estimate, but I could easily see it drift upwards. Either way it'd definitely be pushing the limits of passive tablet cooling at that performance level. Who knows, we could soon see GPU frequency throttling down after a certain amount of time in order to keep inside a certain thermal profile.I don't know, if Adreno 225 used 1W and the performance is 4.7x better then it sounds like 6-8W will mean 28% to 70% worse perf/W at peak. Some of the peak performance improvement is due to a clock bump going from 300MHz to 450MHz which will take its toll in efficiency, but the rest of it is due to a wider uarch which for GPUs shouldn't hurt peak perf/W that much. Given the move to HKMG and uarch improvements 8W seems on the overly pessimistic side, 6W not nearly as much. I do agree well over 4W is pretty much a given.
Oh, and as for power... yes, tablets have higher tolerances, however I wouldn't be at all surprised if Adreno 330 was drawing over 4 watts to achieve that level of performance, more likely somewhere in the 6-8 watt range. (Based on the GPU power usage in Anandtech's x86 vs ARM power usage article - Mali T-604 uses around 3.5 watts for 43 fps in GLBenchmark 2.5 while Adreno 225 uses around 1 watt for 14.5 fps on the android side while Tegra 3 uses around 1.75 watts for 11.5 fps and SGX 545 uses 0.75 watts for 7 fps on the windows side which isn't as useful for this extrapolation.)
As information:
Tegra 4 uses 3,674W for 54FPS in 2.5:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/tegra-4-tegra-4i-gpu-architecture,3445-5.html
We don't know if Qualcomm's reference plattform was limited to 5W.
I don't believe that Qualcomm released a reference tablet that clocks at GPU at a rate they don't recommend other tablets clock it at. Kind of belies the whole "reference" aspect of it all. And if that tablet included active cooling - which is what the article says is the driver for this power limit - I think someone would have mentioned it.