Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite Adreno GPU matches AMD Radeon 780M in gaming. Additional metrics on the SOC as a whole revealed

[Zodiark1593]

2 hours ago, RejZoR said:

Anyone tried Linux on these ARM laptops? How does that work given that Windows on ARM is absolute poop? Is Linux on ARM processors any good? I'd totally have ARm laptop with Ubuntu on it or something.

Note: I’m literally thinking as I go.
 

One question in the back of my mind is if there’s enough motive in PC-space for a performant x86-64 emulator. 
 

Apple Rosetta shows it can be done, but outside pc gaming, there’s few consumer and even production applications that don’t already have ARM-compatible versions, and anything else (such as running old machinery) doesn’t need especially fast performance. 

 

 Nvidia does already make SoCs and has experience with fast ARM custom designs, so I feel it makes sense (if they felt the market worth the investment) that they’d probably be a big player in hypothetical desktop ARM SoCs. Fast x86 emulation could be a pretty big selling point for Nvidia, assuming Intel and AMD don’t step up to the plate. 
 

Intel could also be uniquely positioned to really capitalize on the PC gaming market, as they’ve extensive experience in x86 (they built it) and ARM designs (and everything in between), and have massively ramped up their GPU tech in a big way. Intel has the pieces they need, so if they’ve put investment into designing good ARM cores the past few years, the moment desktop shifts to ARM could see Intel snapping up huge market share very quickly. 
 

I’m unsure if dedicated GPUs will even be a thing in the ARM desktop world. Though there will always be a need for more compute (for more than just gaming), so I’m reasonably confident that dGPUs are not going away. In which case, the status quo seems more likely. I don’t see Qualcomm putting much investment into speedy x86 emulation, not like Apple did with Rosetta anyway.

[igormp]

6 hours ago, RejZoR said:

Anyone tried Linux on these ARM laptops? How does that work given that Windows on ARM is absolute poop? Is Linux on ARM processors any good? I'd totally have ARm laptop with Ubuntu on it or something.

You can run linux on Macbooks with Mx chips, does that count?

Apart from that, you can run linux on some other ARM laptops, like the X13s, it runs fine, the problem is that the current ARM CPUs themselves are pretty weak, so it's hard to compare.

3 hours ago, Zodiark1593 said:

Note: I’m literally thinking as I go.
 

One question in the back of my mind is if there’s enough motive in PC-space for a performant x86-64 emulator. 
 

Apple Rosetta shows it can be done, but outside pc gaming, there’s few consumer and even production applications that don’t already have ARM-compatible versions, and anything else (such as running old machinery) doesn’t need especially fast performance. 

 

 Nvidia does already make SoCs and has experience with fast ARM custom designs, so I feel it makes sense (if they felt the market worth the investment) that they’d probably be a big player in hypothetical desktop ARM SoCs. Fast x86 emulation could be a pretty big selling point for Nvidia, assuming Intel and AMD don’t step up to the plate. 
 

Intel could also be uniquely positioned to really capitalize on the PC gaming market, as they’ve extensive experience in x86 (they built it) and ARM designs (and everything in between), and have massively ramped up their GPU tech in a big way. Intel has the pieces they need, so if they’ve put investment into designing good ARM cores the past few years, the moment desktop shifts to ARM could see Intel snapping up huge market share very quickly. 
 

I’m unsure if dedicated GPUs will even be a thing in the ARM desktop world. Though there will always be a need for more compute (for more than just gaming), so I’m reasonably confident that dGPUs are not going away. In which case, the status quo seems more likely. I don’t see Qualcomm putting much investment into speedy x86 emulation, not like Apple did with Rosetta anyway.

Linux already has x86 emulation stuff that's almost on par with Rosetta, see FEX-Emu and Box86/Box64.

It is said that there will be laptops with that SD Elite + Nvidia dGPUs. There are already ARM drivers for Nvidia, AMD and Intel GPUs on Linux, and I believe that should have internal ARM versions for Windows too.

 

I guess it'd make more sense for Nvidia to create ARM workstations with their Grace offerings instead of regular consumer devices, since those could be shipped with just linux for ML/DL development, akin to their DGX stations.

[hishnash]

15 hours ago, igormp said:

I guess it'd make more sense for Nvidia to create ARM workstations with their Grace offerings instead of regular consumer devices, since those could be shipped with just linux for ML/DL development, akin to their DGX stations.

I think within a few years we will see NV consider shipping a laptop and regular desktop ARM SOC offerings. They have the ability to put peruser on both game and SW vendors but also on OEMs.   Im sure NV would love to sell SOC+RAM packages to OEMs just like they do for GPUs (think of the margin they are giving up right now only selling the GPU+VRAM when they could be selling all the core system chips)... once this AI/ML bubble flattens they will be back to take the PC windows gaming space for sure. 

[hishnash]

19 hours ago, Zodiark1593 said:

Intel could also be uniquely positioned to really capitalize on the PC gaming market, as they’ve extensive experience in x86 (they built it) and ARM designs (and everything in between), and have massively ramped up their GPU tech in a big way.

Building the X86 cpu is not what is going to get you a good translation layer.  The high perf tools (like rossate2 are based on offline lifting and transcompiling.. this is all a compiler experts job and APPLE being the long term lead of the LLVM project are best placed for this).   

I would not expect intel to do that good a job, they have failed so many times when trying to ship new arcs that I just don't know if that ship can turn. 

 

19 hours ago, Zodiark1593 said:

I’m unsure if dedicated GPUs will even be a thing in the ARM desktop world.

I don't see why not however I do see the market shifting for sure.  When you end up building a ultra wide ARM design like apples you need enough bandwidth just to feed the CPU and NPU and all the video decode and encode you might as well put a mid sized GPU on the die otherwise most of that bandwidth will sit un-used almost all the time. 

[saltycaramel]

https://wccftech.com/snapdragon-x-cpu-microsoft-surface-laptop-6-13-5-15-dell-inspiron-14-plus-leak/

 

Weird that the smaller 13.5" Surface Laptop 6 with ARM will max out at 16GB RAM and 512GB ssd.

The 13.6" M3 Macbook Air goes up to 24GB RAM and 2TB ssd. 

[saltycaramel]

19 hours ago, saltycaramel said:

https://wccftech.com/snapdragon-x-cpu-microsoft-surface-laptop-6-13-5-15-dell-inspiron-14-plus-leak/

 

Weird that the smaller 13.5" Surface Laptop 6 with ARM will max out at 16GB RAM and 512GB ssd.

The 13.6" M3 Macbook Air goes up to 24GB RAM and 2TB ssd. 

 

[ewitte]

Tested windows for arm in parallels a bit it seems fine.  The translation software works pretty good without a huge performance hit.

[Forbidden Wafer]

On 4/28/2024 at 9:22 PM, igormp said:

Linux already has x86 emulation stuff that's almost on par with Rosetta, see FEX-Emu and Box86/Box64.

Hmm, not really on par. I recently tried running some x86 services on an ARM server we got in the lab, and it isn't that compatible. 

[saltycaramel]

On 10/30/2023 at 7:03 PM, saltycaramel said:

First of all, what even is the equivalent Apple chip to compare against the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite (or SxE)? The M2, the M2 Pro or the M2 Max? Or maybe more appropriately the actual Apple chips for 2024 (M3, M3 Pro and M3 Max, being released tonight)?

 

The SxE is a 12 P-core homogeneous design, with no E-cores.

 

Additionally, the SxE, compared to Apple’s chips, is heavily skewed towards allocating its transistor budget (or die area if you will) to the CPU section of the SoC, and has a comparatively smaller GPU. Apple’s M3 chips will run circles around the SxE in terms of GPU, roughly with the M3 being 1x the SxE, the M3 Pro being 2x and the M3 Max being 4x in terms of GPU results, not to mention they’ll most certainly have hw ray tracing, which the SxE lacks (edit: or lacks temporarily, apparently).

 

The best way to approximate what the SxE is ballpark-comparable to could be “the CPU of an M2 Max in MT terms + the CPU of an M2 Pro in ST terms + the GPU of a base M2”. (Or swap “M3” for “M2” after tonight’s M3 unveiling)

 

Hence:

- comparing the ST performance to the M2 Max is theatre, ‘cause you might as well compare it to an M2 Pro or even a well cooled M2, it’s not like ST changes much accross the M2 family, but saying “faster in ST than the M2 Max” sounds more impressive

- comparing the MT performance to the humble base M2 (with its 4p+4e cores, vs 12p cores in the SxE) is…what is it, even? Really?

- comparing the GPU performance to the humble base M2…is cherry picking the only M2 chip the SxE can beat in terms of GPU. (Probably the base M3 tonight will take away even that)

 

Just pick one Apple chip to go against Qualcomm, and then be consistent with the comparison, power efficiency and all. 
 

The way they did it has been just confusing. 

So, yesterday at the “Copilot Plus PC” event Microsoft indulged a lot in direct comparisons vs the M3 MacBook Air. 

 

To add to my perplexities above (about comparing a 12-big-core CPU in the Snapdragon X Elite vs a 4-big-4-little-core CPU in the vanilla base M2/M3), one little trick the Surface Laptop 7 ARM has up its sleeve compared to the fanless MacBook Air M3: