Qualcomm's Oryon core: A long time in the making

https://chipsandcheese.com/2024/07/09/qualcomms-oryon-core-a-long-time-in-the-making/

by rbanffy • 2 years ago

170 170 2 years ago

bhouston4• 2 years ago

From the article it seems like it clones a lot of the Apple M1 technology. So smart acquisition on Qualcomm's part to get competitive again.

Apple engineers who worked on the Apple M4 should go start another company so Qualcomm can acquire it again for +1B. :). Or better yet, acquired by ARM themselves.

It is likely that as this tech makes it to the smartphone market, Android phones are going to get a major speed boost. They have been so uncompetitive against Apple for a while now.

kernal3• 2 years ago

Android phones are going to get a major speed boost. They have been so uncompetitive against Apple for a while now.

Uncompetitive? These numbers indicate otherwise while being on a previous generation TSMC 4nm node. Just imagine if they were on the same 3nm node as the A17.

https://nanoreview.net/en/soc-list/rating

https://www.androidauthority.com/snapdragon-8-gen-3-vs-apple...

immibis• 2 years ago

It doesn't matter how fast the CPU is, if you can't run the software you need to.

bhouston4• 2 years ago

Looking at this chart Apple just destroys the competition:

https://browser.geekbench.com/mobile-benchmarks

Also Apple's mobile devices destroy the competition in this chart as well if you sort by thread:

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/CPU_mega_page.html

pjmlp4• 2 years ago

My Nokia and Samsung devices have kept me happy for the last decade, hardly a reason to envy iDevices.

I get access to the Apple ecosystem via my job, and still haven't bought a single thing from them for private use.

walterbell• 2 years ago

because there has not been any upstreamed Device Tree for this laptop, we were not able to get a Linux desktop installed

Looking forward to tests of Linux on Arm UEFI ("SystemReady") for laptops based on Qualcomm Oryon.

rjsw2• 2 years ago

I don't think any of the Linux GPU drivers are written to work with UEFI/ACPI.

assassinator42• 2 years ago

I've been confused by this, aren't these systems using ACPI instead of Device Tree? I know AWS ARM systems use ACPI.

wmf• 2 years ago

Qualcomm is using device tree.

retskrad• 2 years ago

The M4 is the highest single core CPU in the world and it’s in a ridiculously thin tablet without cooling. I don’t understand where this idea that Apple has lost most of their chip design talent and is in trouble rhetoric is coming from. Apple still makes the world’s most advanced and efficient consumer chips, years after the M1.

Sakos3• 2 years ago

I think people generally expected larger improvements between iterations. Intel and AMD continue to deliver sizeable performance and efficiency gains every 1-2 years while it feels like the Apple M-series isn't getting comparable gains. It definitely seems like Apple has suffered significant enough brain drain in recent years that they're finding it difficult to iterate on the M1.

TylerE6• 2 years ago

Hasn't each gen been like 20-30% performance? Isn't that better than what AMD and Intel have managed?

mrbungie• 2 years ago

I'm still waiting for chips to compete with the perf/watt ratios and general efficiency of the M-series chips.

Snapdragon X Elite + Windows ARM is getting there, but their GPU perf leaves a lot to be desired.

Is Apple a victim of their own success? Idk, but diminishing returns are a thing you know.

tedunangst• 2 years ago

You're only allowed to be the darling for one year or so. Then you suck again.

throwaway20374• 2 years ago

So true. On HN, 15 mins is the time to expiry.

Rinzler8919• 2 years ago

The M4 is the highest single core CPU in the world and it’s in a ridiculously thin tablet

That's kind of the problem. The world's most powerful CPU is put in the world's most expensive and thinnest Netflix machine lol. Was the previous "thicker" M3 iPad holding anyone back?

All that power and I can't use it to compile the Linux kernel, I can't use it to play the latest Steam/GOG games, or run CAD simulations, because it needs to be behind the restrictive iPad OS AppStore walled garden where only code blessed by Apple can run.

Until it's put in a machine that can run Linux, it's more of a benchmarking flex than actually increasing productivity compared to previous M generations or the ARM/X86 competition that allows you to run any OS.

dagmx8• 2 years ago

That’s a very narrow definition of “useful” and one I’d say is rather focused on yourself?

Why is Linux the arbiter of what is “useful”? Why would it still be a benchmark flex if it was on macOS, an Os where millions of people do professional work everyday?

And why is the iPad just a “Netflix machine” when tons of people use the iPad for professional creative use cases as well?

pantalaimon• 2 years ago

The world's most powerful CPU

maybe the most powerful / watt - desktop CPUs like the 9950X are still way more powerful.

runjake2• 2 years ago

It's not just a benchmark flex. I have been using Linux since 1992, for many or most of those years on both desktop and server. I am currently more productive while on an Apple Silicon Mac.

I would venture to guess that for most people, they would be more productive on a Mac or an iPad versus Linux.

Pedantry: To my knowledge, there was no M3 iPad.

ben_w13• 2 years ago

No year will ever be "the year of Linux on the desktop", despite that phrase being so old that if I'd conceived a child when I first heard it, I'd be a grandparent already.

The fact that you can't imagine a device being useful until it can compile the Linux kernel etc., that you dismiss it as a "Netflix machine", says more about you than about Apple.

monocasa2• 2 years ago

To a degree, that makes sense. Due to the end of dennard scaling, most high end raw compute makes more sense as more but simpler cores, and has for a long time. For instance the blue gene supercomputers made of tons of pretty individually anemic PowerPC 4xx cores.

For battery powered devices, race to sleep is the current meta, where once you have some bit of heavy compute work, you power up a big core, run it fast to get through all of the work as quickly as possible, and get back to low power as quickly as possible.

sitkack4• 2 years ago

I run Linux in a VM on my M1 mac all day long. That VM was the fastest Linux instance I had anywhere. Faster the my 5950 and way faster than anything in cloud. Your can't using it is your choice.

entropicdrifter• 2 years ago

Asahi Linux runs great on all of the M-series Macs

jjtheblunt2• 2 years ago

https://www.linuxfordevices.com/tutorials/linux/linux-on-the...

turtlebits• 2 years ago

The fact that Apple put a fast chip in a limited device doesn't detract from their engineering ability.

gumby2• 2 years ago

Was the previous "thicker" M3 iPad holding anyone back?

Since I carry a laptop and an ipad, the lighter the better (I use them for different things, and often in concert). That MacBook Air is so powerful and so light that I sometimes have to check my bag to make sure I haven’t forgotten one or both.

That’s definitely worth it to me.

dagmx8• 2 years ago

The idea that Apple lost their most important talent came from SemiAnalysis. It’s a saucy idea so it spread from there without much backing.

They’re a tech news blog mixed with heavy doses of dramatized conjecture.

The primary author has written multiple times that Apple has lost lots of their key talent but has never been able to back it up beyond “I keep tabs on LinkedIn”.

End of the day, tech folks like drama as much as the next person. Sites like that are the equivalent to celebrity focused tabloids.

forrestthewoods3• 2 years ago

I don’t understand where this idea that Apple has lost most of their chip design talent and is in trouble rhetoric is coming from.

Why are you saying this? The article doesn't seem to imply that?

Apple isn't in any kind of trouble. But the gap between Apple and the competition does appear to be closing. Right now Apple's biggest advantage is they buy up all of TSMC supply for the latest node. They're always a little faster because they're always a node ahead.

Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite is reasonably impressive from a CPU and x86 emulation perspective. The GPU hardware seems kinda sorta ok. But their GPU drivers are dog poop. Which is why they suck for Windows gaming.

I hope AMD and Nvidia start to release ARM SoC designs for laptops/desktops next year. That could get interesting fast. All hail competition!

hajile3• 2 years ago

The first 4 minute mile was revolutionary. It’s not ordinary today, but isn’t super surprising either.

Apple bet big that we hasn’t hit the limits of how wide a machine can go. They created ARM64 to push this idea as it tries to eliminate things that make this hard.

Everyone wrote off iPhone performance as mobile only and not really representative of performance on a “real” computer.

M1 changed that and set the clock ticking. Once everyone realized it was possible, they needed to adjust future plans and start work on their own copy (with companies like Nuvia having a head start in accepting the new way of things due to leadership who believed in M1 performance).

In the next few years, very wide machines will just be the way things are done and while they won’t be hyper common, they won’t be surprising either.

Wytwwww2• 2 years ago

I hope AMD and Nvidia start to release ARM SoC designs for laptops/desktops next year

Or AMD / Intel could just make more power efficient x86 core? What would they gain by switching to ARM?

Also developing a competitive ARM core in less than a year is pretty much impossible, it took Qualcomm several years to catch up with ARMs cores (hence the title...). They even had to buy another company to accomplish that.

Derbasti• 2 years ago

And that's exactly why it's so cool to see this in the Surface tablets.

...he writes, on his Snapdragon Surface tablet.

(Also, I find it hella entertaining that a snapdragon is a cute little flower, martial naming notwithstanding)

paulmd• 2 years ago

It comes from the idea that apple didn’t advance significantly in M2 and M3, which are equally untrue, but equally pervasive.

People were absolutely sure that apple made basically no real advancement but just were running up the TDPs and that’s where all their M2 and M3 gains came from. That was the narrative for the last 2 years. But then you look at geekerwan and apple is making 20, 30% steps every gen, and with perf/w climbing upwards every gen too. Mainstream sites just didn’t want to do the diligence, plus there’s a weird persistent bias against the idea of apple being good. It’s gotta just be the node… or the accelerators… or the OS…

Reminder that we sit here 3 years later and even giving AMD a node advantage (7940HS vs M2/M3 family) they’re still pulling >20W core-only single-thread power (even ignoring the x86 platform power problems!) to compete with a 5W M2 thread. And yes, you can limit it but then they lose on performance instead.

https://youtu.be/EbDPvcbilCs?t=928

https://youtu.be/EbDPvcbilCs?t=1000

https://youtu.be/EbDPvcbilCs?t=708

But yeah, anyway, that’s where it came from. People completely dismissed M2 and M3 as having any worthwhile advancement (even with laptops they could objectively analyze!) and were in the process of repeating this for M4 yet again. So why wouldn’t you think that three generations of stagnation indicates apple has a problem? The problem is that apple hasn’t actually stagnated - there is an epistemic closure issue and a lot of people won’t admit it or aren’t exposed to that information, because it’s being proxied through this lens of 25% of the tech community being devout apple anti-fanboys.

It's a problem with every single apple/android thread too. People will admit with the ML stuff that apple does a much better job handling PII (keeping it on-device, offering e2e encryption between devices, using anonymizing tokens when it needs to go to a service), and people intellectually understand they use the same approaches and techniques in other areas too, but suggest that maybe apple isn't quite as bad as the literal adtech company and you'll get the works. People don't want to think of themselves as fanboys but... there is a large contingent that does all the things fanboys would do and says all the things fanboys would say, and acts how fanboys would act, and nevertheless thinks they're the rock of neutrality standing between two equally-bad choices. False balance is very intellectually comforting.

https://paulgraham.com/fh.html

stefan_• 2 years ago

I don't understand what prompted you to bring up the M4 in a meticulously researched deep-dive on the Oryon architecture. The original article doesn't mention it once. Is this just flame bait?

refulgentis2• 2 years ago

Thank you for saying it out loud. 100%. Seen a handful of very strange top comments this week that you usually wouldn't see on HN, I assume because of the holidays.

i.e. more practicing rhetoric than contributing content, and/or, leaning on rhetorical strategies to do a more traditional definition of trolling circa early 2000s Slashdot. i.e. generate tons of replies by introducing a tangent that'll generate conversation.

MobiusHorizons• 2 years ago

The article does reference firestorm cores like those in M series chips. It’s also an obvious comparison, because the Oryon is the only other desktop class ARM chip not designed by ARM the company. This chip is what Microsoft will try to use to compete with M series chips of which the latest is the M4. Seems like the obvious competition

refulgentis2• 2 years ago

I don’t understand where this idea that Apple has lost most of their chip design talent and is in trouble rhetoric is coming from.

I think...you?

I read the article in full a few hours ago and didn't see anything like that.

I skimmed it again, and also gave it a go of grepping TFA "lost", "talent" "trouble": 0 results (Chrome, command F).

m463• 2 years ago

if you tried to say "Apple still makes the world’s most advanced and efficient chips" instead of qualifying it with "consumer" who would you be cutting out?

I think "consumer" literally means people who consume things, instead of people who create things. Before detouring into "content creators", people who create things are frequently engineers and scientists, who apple does not target.

Unfortunately, I think apple doesn't do general purpose computing. sigh.

ksec8• 2 years ago

The article doesn't even mentioned M4. Dont know why you are bringing this up.

Apple has lost some or many of their chip design talent. Not All or Most.

They did't lost it all at the same time either.

Many of them have been working on M2 and M3, some later ones may be on M4 before they left.

Apple has a node advantage, which is in itself a separate discussion. This article is straightly about IPC.

We didn't even go into Die Size and cost analysis.

throwaway20374• 2 years ago

    > Apple has lost some or many of their chip design talent. Not All or Most.

Did you read this somewhere? I tried to Google for it, but I cannot find anything. Or do you have an inside source?

The last that I knew/read, Johny Srouji was the key senior executive in the Apple CPU division. It looks like they continue to expand his R&D labs in Israel (according to a Wiki source).

Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johny_Srouji

phkahler• 2 years ago

Get proper Linux support and the RISC-V variant they seemed to be working on and I'll buy the laptop ;-) I have no interest in Windows and even less so on ARM.

quic_bcain• 2 years ago

You don't want a RISC-V laptop. Not yet, at least. It will take quite some doing before those compete with x86_64/arm laptops.

Beautiful thing about Windows computers is that it's generally not too hard to make them into linux/BSD/etc computers. :)

Qualcomm [1] and some vendors [2][3] are making progress towards linux support though.

[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.8-ARM-Changes

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/ASUS-Vivbook-S-15-Elite-X-Linu...

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/news/TUXEDO-Snapdragon-X-Elite

mixmastamyk• 2 years ago

To get a good laptop, often you need to start with a bad one.

hajile3• 2 years ago

Jim Keller is confident that Ascalon will have performance close to zen5 when it is finished later this year. Chips in hand could be some than a lot of people seen to think.

kernal3• 2 years ago

Finally, Snapdragon X Elite devices are too expensive. Phoenix and Meteor Lake laptops often cost less, even when equipped with more RAM and larger SSDs. Convincing consumers to pay more for lower specifications is already a tough sell. Compatibility issues make it even tougher. Qualcomm needs to work with OEMs to deliver competitive prices.

Qualcomm can start by working with their accountants and reducing the price they charge for their SoCs. Rumors indicate the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 mobile SoC, with Oryon cores, will cost between $220-$240 USD.

perfsea• 2 years ago

I wonder how effectively it can utilize all of its execution units for common workloads. Frontend boundedness is often a big issue especially with jit

Qualcomm's Oryon core: A long time in the making

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