Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite Performance Preview: A First Look at What's to Come

https://www.anandtech.com/show/21112/qualcomm-snapdragon-x-elite-performance-preview-a-first-look-at-whats-to-come

by ksec • 3 years ago

79 66 3 years ago

tiffanyh• 3 years ago

Question: is this the first chip created by the folks from NUVIA (the crew behind Apple Silicon), that Qualcomm acquired 2-years ago?

https://www.qualcomm.com/news/releases/2021/03/qualcomm-comp...

goosedragons• 3 years ago

Yup.

agloe_dreams• 3 years ago

Yes, the same team that got their pants sued off by like a bunch of other companies such as ARM and Apple.

MikusR2• 3 years ago

It's also is the design ARM (the company) is suing to be destroyed. Like literally destroyed.

lvass2• 3 years ago

I'm hoping this one and many more get stuck in legal hell for ages so we finally move away from proprietary ISAs.

nicpottier• 3 years ago

Looks promising. Can we get one of these in a Framework laptop now?

masterofsome• 3 years ago

Judging based on how difficult it was to transition to also making AMD mainboards, I doubt we would see this for YEARS.

soapdog2• 3 years ago

Doubt it, I suspect Microsoft will get an exclusivity deal going on with them so they're only sold to Windows-on-ARM machines.

wyldfire3• 3 years ago

From the article:

Regardless, the primary purpose of the Linux demo was to showcase that Linux was working on the Snapdragon Elite X as well – that it’s not just for Windows – as Qualcomm has aims of getting the SoC into Linux laptops as well.

Some person on the internet [1] says "The good news is that the exclusivity of Microsoft's Qualcomm 8cx series has ended. Moving forward, we will be able to encounter the 8cx series in a greater variety of form factors. For instance, there are plans to incorporate the 8cx Gen4 into Chromebooks as well." I'm not sure if exclusivity of 8cx Gen4 is different from X Elite though.

[1] https://x.com/Tech_Reve/status/1670038184405901313?s=20

magnio• 3 years ago

The past 5 years in personal computing has been surreal. After years of Intel dominating and stagnating the desktop and laptop market, competition from AMD (Ryzen) and subsequently Apple (Apple Silicon) has been a real treat for consumer. After years of Apple squarely beating the shit out of Qualcomm and years of Qualcomm not giving a shit due to its Android monopoly, competition from MediaTek (Dimensity) forced them to up their game. Now Apple is setting the standard for laptop performance, AMD is reviving the Windows laptop scene, Qualcomm is catching up to Apple CPU, outperforming its GPU, and realizing the Windows ARM dream. Exciting, exciting times ahead.

re-thc• 3 years ago

and years of Qualcomm not giving a shit due to its Android monopoly

What Qualcomm has is a modem and modem patent monopoly. There were early Android SoC competitors e.g. nVidia Tegra. The issue was the modem. Not the CPU.

GeekyBear4• 3 years ago

What Qualcomm did have was an undisputed patent monopoly on one of the possible ways that cellular communication could be done.

Now that 3G is being turned completely off in much of the world, the last vestiges of that advantage are going away and Qualcomm will have to learn to compete on a more level playing field.

hulitu• 3 years ago

Now Apple is setting the standard for laptop performance,

Too bad it doesn't run Windows. Sincerely, the purchasing department. /s

jacooper• 3 years ago

Controversial opinion, but yes, it not running Windows Is annoying and a deal breaker for some. MacOS is really that bad.

airstrike• 3 years ago

No M2 Pro comparison?

conjecTech• 3 years ago

Gary Explains gave some numbers that seem to indicate its on-par or a bit better than M2 Pro at similar power levels.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8wzGkTWdP8&t=348s

mkl• 3 years ago

https://www.notebookcheck.net/First-Snapdragon-X-Elite-bench..., discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38070449

fh9302• 3 years ago

The Snapdragon X Elite CPU is closer to the M2 Pro / Max, while the GPU is closer to the regular M2. This makes comparisons a bit difficult without knowing price and resulting battery life.

127361• 3 years ago

It would be really nice to have Raspberry Pi-like developer board with this chip. At one point Qualcomm released full documentation for their SoCs, with a publicly available manual with near complete register documentation. I think it was for the APQ8064. It even included Adreno GPU registers and some GPS/WiFi baseband related stuff.

* An unfused SoC, so no secure boot etc. The Efuse VPP pin is tied to ground so no possibility of bricking it by blowing the fuses inadvertently.

* Fully open bootloader, e.g. U-Boot based.

* Mostly complete register documentation for the SoC, that would be good enough.

* Mainline Linux support.

Such a board would take the open source world by storm.

wmf3• 3 years ago

An X Elite board would probably be $500 though.

snvzz4• 3 years ago

I would look at RISC-V instead.

Competitive very high performance cores already available for licensing include SiFive P870, Ventana Veyron as well as Tenstorrent Ascalon or Alastor.

We just need the SoC.

user_7832• 3 years ago

Yes but then there's the question of software support. Arm supports android which has a huge ecosystem. And there are way more linux and other obscure/niche OSes which support arm like raspbian. If there was an easy way to run arm or x86 code on risk-v like rosetta that could help, but arm still has much better support than risk v.

blinkingled• 3 years ago

I don't care about Qualcomm and its ARM offerings for the PC - Windows side there's no reason to and Linux side because hardware longevity will be hobbled by lacking kernel and driver support beyond the first year or two.

You can't really beat Intel and AMD unless you're at least as good as supporting the hardware and peripherals and for as long. I can see Intel and AMD getting better at power use but I have a hard time seeing ARM ecosystem become as open as the PC one.

Terretta• 3 years ago

You can't really beat Intel and AMD unless you're at least as good as supporting the hardware

Worth a read:

Amazon is the most successful manufacturer of Arm server chips, accounting for just over half of Arm-based server CPUs currently deployed, while some chipmakers are also now betting on Arm-based Windows PCs.

This information comes from a report issued by Bernstein Research which estimates that nearly 10 percent of servers across the world contain Arm processors, and 40 percent of those are located in China, as we reported earlier.

But that total is beaten by just one company – Amazon – which has slightly above 50 percent of all Arm server CPUs in the world deployed in its Amazon Web Services (AWS) datacenters, said the analyst.

https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/08/amazon_arm_servers/

pbalcer• 3 years ago

So? The fact that the most successful Arm server product is a proprietary one designed and used exclusively by one company literally proves OP point. It's much easier to support such deployment if you are its designer and sole user.

wmf3• 3 years ago

For desktop Linux, Qualcomm and the community are upstreaming drivers so you should be able to upgrade the kernel.

lvass2• 3 years ago

AFAICT, you still can't boot linux on snapdragon 7c gen2 laptops which released over 2 years ago. Using windows on them really sucks too.

TYPE_FASTER• 3 years ago

If this chip is comparable to a M2, then I would bet on Microsoft investing more in Windows 11 on ARM. There is value for them across all their product lines, from Surface devices where performance vs. efficiency is important from a battery life perspective, to Azure, where competitive products are rolling out ARM support that is really compelling from a cost perspective.

GeekyBear4• 3 years ago

The only place that this makes sense over Intel/AMD on the Windows side is for laptops where ARM offers lower power draw, less heat, and longer battery life.

For a desktop, if you don't care about power and heat, then this will have inferior performance.

Nuvia had a core designed for server chips when Qualcomm bought them, and Qualcomm publishing benchmarks at an 80 watt TDP, tells me that their chip isn't going to be well positioned to compete on power draw, heat and battery life against next year's chips, especially without any sort of efficiency core at all.

wyldfire3• 3 years ago

Qualcomm is really trying to turn things around - on all fronts.

Upstreaming is clearly a higher priority now than it's been in the past, e.g. "Upstream Linux support now available for the the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 Mobile Platform" [1]

Disclaimer: I'm a Qualcomm employee.

[1] https://www.linaro.org/blog/upstream-linux-support-now-avail...

almatabata• 3 years ago

This part had me the most worried. Given Qualcomm's history they really need to show they mean it otherwise they will have trough convincing people to invest in their chip. With mobile and automotive Qualcomm had a habit of dropping the support after 3 years unless the OEM paid up. As an end user i do not want to own an insecure laptop after 3 years just because the manufacturer did not want to pay qualcomm.

If they actually sustain this effort I can see this new chip becoming a success regardless if it beats the M2 or not. It only has to have decent performance and decent linux support. Fingers crossed, I hope they succeed.

dingi2• 3 years ago

AFAIK that's just the bare minimum to get Linux booting. GPU and host of other things are missing.

wyldfire3• 3 years ago

That doesn't correspond to what the article itself says. GPU might not be supported yet but it doesn't look like the bare minimum either.

EDIT - looks like there's GPU support too. https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.5-MSM-Adreno-A690

~~~~~~~~

With the recent series of patches released by Linaro, the following features are enabled for the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 Mobile Platform:

Qualcomm® Kryo™ CPUs, including DVFS (Dynamic voltage and frequency scaling) and Power Management

System foundation: Clocks, Power controllers, PMICs Low-Speed I/O: I2C, SPI, RTC, Buttons, LEDs

High-Density Storage: UFS 4.0, SDXC

High-Speed Peripherals: PCIe Gen3 and Gen4, USB Version 3.1 Gen 2, USB-C PD

Qualcomm® Hexagon™ Processor SubSystems: Audio, Sensors, Compute and Modem

Mobile Display Subsystem + DSI Engine, Touch Controller

Communication: WCN7850 Bluetooth

snvzz4• 3 years ago

I am not sure what Qualcomm is hoping to accomplish by releasing this, rather than committing to RISC-V.

slaw• 3 years ago

There is no Windows for RISC-V, not even .NET is ported.

snvzz4• 3 years ago

We learned there is, a year ago, in late 2022's RISC-V Summit.

Windows came up a few times in RISC-V's foundation own talks.

An official announcement would follow hardware availability. rather than the other way around.

lloyds_barclays• 3 years ago

Impressive. I have used laptops with Snapdragon 835 and 850. Native app and battery performance are passable. I wish Microsoft and Qualcomm could bring PCs the same portable experience as Apple Silicon devices.

jeffbee2• 3 years ago

I wonder to what extent their 8-channel memory controller is helping. Intel has been selling 2-channel memory subsystems into the desktop and mobile market for a long time, still doing that even on 24-core CPUs. I believe the cheapest 8-channel CPU Intel offers costs $2000. Perhaps this level of competition will help them fix that.

wtallis3• 3 years ago

Don't count memory channels, count the total bus width. 128 bits wide is nothing special, even if it is divided into eight channels of 16 bits. That's exactly how Intel and AMD support LPDDR, too.

jeffbee2• 3 years ago

Thanks, I often forget this distinction.

menaerus4• 3 years ago

So, when Apple says 128-bit or 512-bit or 1024-bit wide interface to LPDDR4x/LPDDR5, does this really mean just a number that is derived from number_of_channels x channel_width?

E.g. 128-bit memory wide bus in case of LPDDR type of memory is really just 8x 16-bit channels or, in a different word-size configuration, 4x 32-bit channels.

If that is so, my understanding is that Intel Tiger Lake with its 2x 64-bit channel design would equal to the same 128-bit memory bus width as M1, although, coupled with different type of memory chip technology - DDR4 instead of LPDDR.

speed_spread• 3 years ago

They're big on showing parallel benchmarks but nothing that would give a hint of what the actual single-core IPC is. This doesn't bode that well IMO.

lern_too_spel• 3 years ago

Those are just the benchmarks Anandtech chose to run. Other sources ran single core benchmarks that show higher performance than any other Arm core. https://www.xda-developers.com/snapdragon-x-elite-benchmarks...

neurostimulant• 3 years ago

Showcasing reference designs for performance purposes is very typical overall for Qualcomm. This is also how the company handles their smartphone testing – in most years we’ll get to benchmark a Snapdragon mobile SoC running in a Qualcomm Reference Device (QRD) as a preview before retail devices are available. Even though they’re not a vertically integrated company, they still need to develop devices to test their own hardware, and they like to use those to initially show off their designs.

What's stopping Qualcomm from manufacturing their own phones and laptops and sell them directly to consumers?

Vt71fcAqt7• 3 years ago

At least one aspect is that they don't want to compete with their largest client (samsung). And they don't have the manufacturing ability that samsung has to actually win that competition.

lostmsu• 3 years ago

According to Wikipedia, this one uses 4nm node while M2 is on N5P.

therealcamino• 3 years ago

Well, as of 13 minutes ago Apple announced the M3 which is on the N3 process.

dingi2• 3 years ago

These SOCs could have a better future if they had Linux support to a satisfactory level. I wouldn't touch a Windows ARM device with a ten foot pole, unless of course I can boot Linux on it. Software support is abysmal. On the other hand, due to open source nature of Linux land, the software support is vastly superior provided that the OEM provides upstream drivers.

DrNosferatu• 3 years ago

Then when are we having Hackintoshes on ARM?

Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite Performance Preview: A First Look at What's to Come

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