Discussion Qualcomm Snapdragon Thread

[FlameTail]

Well, now we know why no fanless laptops have been unveiled yet...

 

[FlameTail]

This is what Android Authority leaked months ago..

Exclusive: Here's what Qualcomm didn't tell you about the Snapdragon X series

The upcoming Snapdragon X1 will be available in five different models: see their specs and performance here.

www.androidauthority.com

 

[NTMBK]

Well looks like this was kind of a dud, thanks for the entertainment y'all. See you back here next year for the Nvidia ARM SoC launch? Maybe they'll even have working graphics drivers

 

[uzzi38]

View attachment 101444
This is what Android Authority leaked months ago..

Exclusive: Here's what Qualcomm didn't tell you about the Snapdragon X series

The upcoming Snapdragon X1 will be available in five different models: see their specs and performance here.

www.androidauthority.com

Yeah and a certain QCOM employee (who I will not name call because that's not cool, but he does deserve a bit of dumping on with all that's happened) decided to show up in a public space and repeatedly claim that it would be impossible to see power figures like this without running a load on CPU and GPU at the same time.

Fast forwards go today, and that's very evidently not the case.

 

[DrMrLordX]

Please no.

Looks like this SDXE launch is promising to be a lukeWARM endeavour! Ha! Ha ha! haaaaa okay I'll stop now.

Seriously though even my silliest inclination to grab one of these things, try to put Linux on it, and tinker has been dampened significantly. Hopefully these will go on firesale sooner or later.

See you back here next year for the Nvidia ARM SoC launch?

Eww no thanks.

 

[coercitiv]

X Elite is not even good for AI?

Copilot+ PC launch day live blog: Testing the new Snapdragon Laptops

The first group of Copilot+ PCs, powered by Snapdragon X CPUs, are out today and we're benchmarking them.

www.tomshardware.com

Remember what I talking about a while ago, what I thought QC needed the most?

If QC is smart, they will go after the professionals. Keep the chips lean, offer strong performance and battery life, make sure drivers and apps are top tier, maybe even add an additional layer of software features aimed at professionals and small business owners.[...]

After they get their beachhead in the form of satisfied users in one segment, go wild with some more powerful stuff. A strong and versatile GPU + wide memory bus is probably the future in terms of AI features as well.

They needed a niche to build a reputation on. Now their brand image is all over the place, tainted by lack of proper software support. Gaming should not have been even a remote focus (in terms of PR, development should have been there nonetheless).

That being said, as long as they're in it for the long run, the start of X Elite ain't bad. Let's hope they get healthy enough sales so that OEMs don't panic and QC doesn't pull the plug. It's going to be a looong H2 because I really really doubt AI stuff will sell consumer PCs.

This is what Android Authority leaked months ago.

How do you read that leak? The way I read it was that when pushed to top SKU specs, using 95% of the chips would results in a max power consumption of ~100W and binning the better 50% of chips would result in ~80W max power consumption.

In other words it was an indicator of overall fitness of silicon. I don't know if my interpretation was correct though, at the time did not have time to check for answers.

 

[FlameTail]

Well looks like this was kind of a dud, thanks for the entertainment y'all. See you back here next year for the Nvidia ARM SoC launch? Maybe they'll even have working graphics drivers

The Nvidia-MTK hype train is about to leave the station..../s

 

[FlameTail]

So yall saying this high power consumption is due to broken phydes?

View attachment 101444

If the phydes was fixed, how much improvement would there be?

 

[adroc_thurston]

Maybe they'll even have working graphics drivers

Tegra always had those so there's that.

Fast forwards go today, and that's very evidently not the case.

The thing is a thirsty boy and loves the juice every bit as much as the likes of Raptor Lake do.
It's funny.

How do you read that leak

It reads "our binning spread is ass".

So yall saying this high power consumption is due to broken phydes?

This can be literally anything and hard to pinpoint until the thing has been measured in details.
RDNA3 was easy to figure out since TPU charts v/f curves and operating voltages/clocks for their ppw workload (CP2077).

 

[Joe NYC]

How do you read that leak? The way I read it was that when pushed to top SKU specs, using 95% of the chips would results in a max power consumption of ~100W and binning the better 50% of chips would result in ~80W max power consumption.

In other words it was an indicator of overall fitness of silicon. I don't know if my interpretation was correct though, at the time did not have time to check for answers.

Yeah, the way I think this could be read that only 50% of the chip are good enough for 80W max power, but 95%, with added juice, can still meet the performance specs but at 100W

 

[TwistedAndy]

X Elite is not even good for AI?

I think fixing issues with Numpy and writing some documentation is not Qualcomm's priority at the moment. They have many other important problems.

Usually, people doing some AI development professionally have to use nVidia anyway.

 

[Gideon]

The turbo / binning situation of Snapdragon X actually reminds me of Zen 1 a lot, which had a similar really limited and broken turbo for 1-2 cores (though it had it for all of the stack), but yeah Qualcomm has a much higher mountain to climb, as the competition is a lot more fierce and they have the ISA difference.

I doubt this is the perf / watt they targeted (this core also needs to go to phone SKUs!) so hopefully they manage to fix it in followup chips, e.g. RDNA 3.5.

But man, was it truley unbelieavably overhyped!

The GPU / driver issue seems particularily bad. I expected older games to have issues but was really hoping it to match / slightly exceed 780M or M3 performance in high-profile, often benchmarked AAA games (BG3, CP2077 etc). Sadly it's not even close. And that is if you diregard crashes graphical glitches. It barely holds on at minimum settings and drops off a cliff with even medium settings. The 8X0M series and Lunar lake will murder it in GPU perf.

Considering how odd and legacy-ridden Adreno architecutre is and ho hard it is to get drivers up to snuff (see Intel, and how much resources they have poured into it for so long) I doubt it will get better any time soon as well. Qualcomm just doesn't seem to take it seriously. So even if they get the GPU hardware right in the furute, I fully expect the drivers to remain at mid 201x intel iGPU level.

 

[adroc_thurston]

Considering how odd and legacy-ridden Adreno architecutre

Not Adreno 700, no.

 

[Gideon]

Not Adreno 700, no.

Good to hear, the rumors are that the next gen will also be a redesign.

Though I must say I'm not nearly as hopeful of their the driver department at the moment. Qualcomm just doesn't seem to take the PC market anywhere near seriously enough (being stuck with ARM v8 while court-battling ARM also doesn't help on the CPU side).

 

[uzzi38]

I doubt this is the perf / watt they targeted (this core also needs to go to phone SKUs!) so hopefully they manage to fix it in followup chips, e.g. RDNA 3.5.

Given X1E-78-100 gets 1805pts (NotebookCheck's numbers) and this was the original target:


Yeah I think that's a safe assumption.

 

[adroc_thurston]

Though I must say I'm not nearly as hopeful of their the driver department at the moment

It's overall just a skinny config relative to how low it clocks.

 

[DisEnchantment]

What happened to the X1 Elite SKUs? I cannot seem to find any review using the 4.3GHz chip
Even the 3.4G chips seems to not have that M1 "competitive" efficiency. Something is amiss.

Additionally, the CPU seems to do well in CB24 and GB6, but in things like native 7Zip, WinRAR, Blender, etc., and others seems to take a beating.

Given X1E-78-100 gets 1805pts (NotebookCheck's numbers) and this was the original target:

View attachment 101447
Yeah I think that's a safe assumption.

This slide was ~5 years ago, it is insane how fast time flies and how long these projects take to come to market.
The fact that they depicted Zen 2 getting beaten soundly but have to face off Zen 5 at launch is nuts.

I was fairly confident their Adreno is garbage, having used them on Linux ( professionally somewhere ) it is lacking many HW/SW features that is commonly present on AMD/Intel platforms with upstream Linux (even 2CU RDNA2 has a richer feature set than Adreno). Can't say more than that.
The reviews show exactly that.

Their NPU was a rebrand of the age old Hexagon DSP with some upgrades not a grounds up purpose built design. Hexagon was OK, not great not terrible, nothing groundbreaking.
Will be interesting to see how this Hexagon NPU is going to look vs XDNA2. XDNA2 with roots to re programmable arrays could be an interesting case study on how to rearrange the logic arrays to fit popular frameworks. Kind of like how we reprogram the old CPLDs at assembly line when the logic function is finalized after manufacture of the devices.

 

[Gideon]

Additionally, the CPU seems to do well in CB24 and GB6, but in things like native 7Zip, WinRAR, Blender, etc., and others seems to take a beating.

Yeah, though part of it is still poorly optimized software as well. Take this for instance (7zip changelog):

Release 24.05 · ip7z/7zip

7-Zip 24.05 7-Zip now can unpack ZSTD archives (.zst filename extension). 7-Zip now can unpack ZIP, SquashFS and RPM archives that use ZSTD compression method. 7-Zip now supports fast hash algorit...

github.com

The speed for LZMA and LZMA2 decompression in ARM64 version for Windows was increased by 20%-60%.

I guess in at least some of these poor-performing software benches we can expect updates to improve performance.

 

[uzzi38]

What happened to the X1 Elite SKUs? I cannot seem to find any review using the 4.3GHz chip

Cheese has an X1E-80 now, we'll get numbers for the 4GHz SKU soon-ish, don't worry.

 

[FlameTail]

Cheese has an X1E-80 now, we'll get numbers for the 4GHz SKU soon-ish, don't worry.

I recall Chlam saying they don't have the money to buy anything since they splurged on Meteor Lake...

 

[Gideon]

Given X1E-78-100 gets 1805pts (NotebookCheck's numbers) and this was the original target:

View attachment 101447
Yeah I think that's a safe assumption.

Olrak at Chips and Cheese discord posted a pretty revealing "actual" graph for that:

 

[FlameTail]

The wizards are hard at work:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1803359156814156082

 

[igor_kavinski]

I wish they wouldn't use Intel's beta silicon as a comparison point

 

[igor_kavinski]

Copilot+ PC launch day live blog: Testing the new Snapdragon Laptops

The first group of Copilot+ PCs, powered by Snapdragon X CPUs, are out today and we're benchmarking them.

www.tomshardware.com

Paint Cocreator will draw a concentration camp, other controversial images

M$ definitely being the AI ethics champion /s

 

[Nothingness]

View attachment 101455
I wish they wouldn't use Intel's beta silicon as a comparison point

155H is beta silicon?