Discussion Qualcomm Snapdragon Thread

[FlameTail]

Sub-$1000 is not budget by any means. That's more like Sub-$400.

$400-$700 is where the volume is.

<$500 = Budget
$500-$1000 = Midrange
>$1000 = Premium

 

[adroc_thurston]

Chromebooks are synonymous with garbage.

Chromebooks are a dead market.
But yes QC please, make a $700 SPP laptop SoC with modem.

<$500 = Budget
$500-$1000 = Midrange
>$1000 = Premium

The tiering is actually a bit more elaborate than that.

 

[poke01]

Why would anyone buy a Chromebook?

More useless than iPads are. At least iPads are worth it to graphic designers and artists. What the heck do you with a Chromebook that you can’t do with a cheap Windows machine?

 

[adroc_thurston]

What the heck do you with a Chromebook that you can’t do with a cheap Windows machine?

No one buys them standalone, they're sold in bulk for education etc purposes.

 

[GTracing]

Why would anyone buy a Chromebook?

More useless than iPads are. At least iPads are worth it to graphic designers and artists. What the heck do you with a Chromebook that you can’t do with a cheap Windows machine?

For certain users, not being able to install programs is a feature.

 

[jpiniero]

No one buys them standalone, they're sold in bulk for education etc purposes.

And sales have gone ice cold now that US students have gone back to school. But plenty of schools still use them.

What the heck do you with a Chromebook that you can’t do with a cheap Windows machine?

Have a decent experience while having skimpy hardware? Windows being what it is.

 

[jpiniero]

Speaking of ChromeOS, I do wonder what the experience would be using ARM/Snapdragon on Linux. Might be a better fit.

 

[FlameTail]

Why would anyone buy a Chromebook?

More useless than iPads are. At least iPads are worth it to graphic designers and artists. What the heck do you with a Chromebook that you can’t do with a cheap Windows machine?

Chromebooks are much more economical. They are cheaper to make than Windows laptops, and you can really see this in the sub-$500 segment, that Chromebooks often have better specs than their Windows laptop counterparts.

 

[FlameTail]

The tiering is actually a bit more elaborate than that

So according to you, what's the tiering?

 

[FlameTail]

Zen = March 2017
Zen+ = April 2018
Zen2 = July 2019
Zen 3 = November 2020.
Zen4 = September 2022
Zen5 = June 2024

Why am I posting this in the Qualcomm thread? Because I want to make an example of it.

When AMD first debuted Ryzen, they faced an uphill battle against Intel. AMD's market share was in the single digit %. From 2017 to 2020, they released a new architecture every single year, until they established themselves in a stable position with Zen3.

Qualcomm is in a similar position today with Snapdragon X, to what Ryzen was in 2017. They have virtually no marketshare and mindshare in PCs. They are facing an uphill battle against Intel/AMD. Qualcomm will need an aggressive roadmap and execute it perfectly, if they are entrench themselves as the 3rd major player in the PC space.

And this is where the problems lie;

Dell's leaked roadmap also gives us a glimpse to Qualcomm's future Oryon roadmap.

Oryon V1: 2024Q3
Oryon V2 : 2025H2
Oryon V3 : 2027Q4

Now of course, this information needs to be taken with a pinch of salt. [1] It's a leak [2] it comes from Dell, not directly Qualcomm. [3] It's a roadmap devised last year, so things may have been changed a bit now.

But this roadmap isn't exactly inspiring confidence. The 12-18 month gap between Oryon V1 and Oryon V2 is fine, but the 24-27 month gap between Oryon V2 and Oryon V3 is a bit alarming. I think Qualcomm should put out Oryon V3 sometime in late 2026 or atleast 2027H1.

And it's not only the release timings of the architectures, but also the uplift brought by each architecture also matters. Oryon V2 will have to bring a ST uplift of ~50% to hold it's own against Zen5 and Apple M5.

 

[FlameTail]

The Snapdragon Dev Kit is underrated.

3 reasons the Snapdragon Dev Kit is the Mac Mini killer we've been waiting for

Out of all the Snapdragon X computers we've seen so far — 14 of which are laptops — it's the Snapdragon Dev Kit that catches my eye.

www.xda-developers.com

"Available for anyone to buy, the Snapdragon Dev Kit is a compact and high-performance desktop option for developers and consumers.
It offers better value than the Mac Mini with more memory at a lower price, making it a strong competitor."

 

[FlameTail]

Qualcomm is putting public ads for the Snapdragon X Elite?

 

[Nothingness]

The Snapdragon Dev Kit is underrated.

3 reasons the Snapdragon Dev Kit is the Mac Mini killer we've been waiting for

Out of all the Snapdragon X computers we've seen so far — 14 of which are laptops — it's the Snapdragon Dev Kit that catches my eye.

www.xda-developers.com

"Available for anyone to buy, the Snapdragon Dev Kit is a compact and high-performance desktop option for developers and consumers.
It offers better value than the Mac Mini with more memory at a lower price, making it a strong competitor."

Does it run Linux?

 

[FlameTail]

Will Qualcomm stick to their naming scheme, for atleast 5 years?

 

[FlameTail]

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite has 45 TOPS of AI acceleration performance, much more than the 18 TOPS found on the M3.

Microsoft also showed off the Surface Laptop hitting a 4.5x inferencing efficiency for its Phi Silica model prompt processing over the M3, alongside 24 TOPS / watt of peak inferencing efficiency.

All of Microsoft’s MacBook Air-beating benchmarks

Microsoft is confident it can beat the MacBook Air.

www.theverge.com

That's a very interesting figure. How did they get it?


According to Qualcomm's official number sin the above image, their NPU uses upto 7.6W.

= 45 TOPS ÷ 7.6W
= ~6 TOPS per Watt.

 

[FlameTail]

2× Phoenix-L @4.2 GHz

6× Phoenix-M @2.8 GHz

This is the rumoured Oryon CPU configuration of Snapdragon 8 Gen 4.

Phoenix-L is seemingly the same uarch as Phoenix in X Elite, but ported to N3E with some tweaks.

But what's more curious is Phoenix-M. What is it's true nature?

[1] A ground up new E-core design.

[2] A modification of Phoenix-L design.

From the information available to us, it's more likely that it's the latter. Reasons:

(A) The name itself. Phoenix-M suggest that it's very heavily related to Phoenix and Phoenix-L. They wouldn't have named it Pheonix-M if it was a ground up redesign.

(B) Qualcomm apparently doesn't have the resources and talent to design and maintain a second lineage of core designs. (According to Adroc).

Then we come to question of how exactly is Phoenix-M modified compared to Phoenix/Phoenix-L. It could be like:

(a). AMD Zen4 -> Zen4C

(b). Intel E -> LPE

(c). Reverse of ARM Cortex A78 -> X1

I guess it could be a mixture of all three. Compared to Phoenix-L; Phoenix-M is designed to run at lower clock speeds at the optimal point of the V/F curve, has less SIMD/Vector pipelines, has smaller caches, and hence uses less die area, and is set in a low-power island.

 

[adroc_thurston]

What is it's true nature?

Same thing clocked lower.
Have you not seen SD820/821?

 

[FlameTail]

Same thing clocked lower.
Have you not seen SD820/821?

Not that simple.

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 Performance Preview: Meet Kryo

www.anandtech.com

Snapdragon 820 had 4 Kryo custom cores.

2× Kryo cores in a High-Performance cluster, with 1 MB of shared L2 cache.

2× Kryo cores in a Low-Power cluster, with 512 KB of shared L2 cache. These were of course, also clocked lower by about 500 MHz.

 

[FlameTail]

https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/1d43rq8/comment/l6bnjz1

This is an example of people who willing to switch from Apple Silicon Macbooks to Windows Laptops with Snapdragon X.

 

[adroc_thurston]

Not that simple.

It is.

2× Kryo cores in a Low-Power cluster, with 512 KB of shared L2 cache. These were of course, also clocked lower by about 500 MHz

It was a poverty cluster basically.
Less cache, less clocks, same exact core to a tee

 

[StinkyPinky]

https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/1d43rq8/comment/l6bnjz1

This is an example of people who willing to switch from Apple Silicon Macbooks to Windows Laptops with Snapdragon X.

I find MacOS slow and clunky. I have never liked it. I have a Mac Mini at home that has this amazing hardware crippled by a bad operation system (IMO).

 

[Ghostsonplanets]

@FlameTail

https://twitter.com/x/status/1796003087208837257

 

[poke01]

https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/1d43rq8/comment/l6bnjz1

This is an example of people who willing to switch from Apple Silicon Macbooks to Windows Laptops with Snapdragon X.

That person is one end of the spectrum.

I find MacOS slow and clunky. I have never liked it. I have a Mac Mini at home that has this amazing hardware crippled by a bad operation system (IMO).

its not for everyone. Those who like it, like it very much and those who dislike it, dislike it.

 

[Thibsie]

That person is one end of the spectrum.

its not for everyone. Those who like it, like it very much and those who dislike it, dislike it.

And those not really having a choice 'cos stupid app is only iOS/MacOS.

 

[poke01]

And those not really having a choice 'cos stupid app is only iOS/MacOS.

could say same thing about Windows/Android. We are all trapped into using systems we don’t like. lol