Question "Microsoft" SQ1 GPU - why is more powerful than Vega 11 (on paper)?

[Panino Manino]

This "new" SOC is the successor for the Snapdragon 8cx.
The predecessor wasn't part of an effort for providing "all day" battery life? So why this new 7W SOC needs a GPU so powerful? 2TFlops when the Surface Ryzen's GPU is only 1.2TFlops at 15W?

 

[NostaSeronx]

It's 2.1 tflops with FP16 at 15W, technically if Surface-Ryzen had RPM or something it would be 2.4 Tflops.

 

[Thala]

This "new" SOC is the successor for the Snapdragon 8cx.
The predecessor wasn't part of an effort for providing "all day" battery life? So why this new 7W SOC needs a GPU so powerful? 2TFlops when the Surface Ryzen's GPU is only 1.2TFlops at 15W?

Adreno is one of the most power efficients GPUs on the market. So no suprise they achieve 2TFlops within a 7W envelope. In addition the Ryzens in the Surface line-up are Vega based, which make them not a particularly good proposition for 15W shared with the CPU.

Regarding the question why a 7W SoC needs a so powerful GPU? I would rather ask why not?

 

[IntelUser2000]

This "new" SOC is the successor for the Snapdragon 8cx.
The predecessor wasn't part of an effort for providing "all day" battery life? So why this new 7W SOC needs a GPU so powerful? 2TFlops when the Surface Ryzen's GPU is only 1.2TFlops at 15W?

It's not as powerful as the GFlops suggests. On Qualcomm's own tests they claimed the Adreno 685 in the 8cx is 20-25% faster in Night Raid compared to UHD 620 graphics systems.

They are claiming with the SQ1 at 7W it does "3x perf/watt" compared to 15W previous generation Intel chips.

Since that's marketing speak that means the SQ1 graphics will do slightly better and perform 50% faster than the UHD 620 with half the power. Ryzen and Icelake graphics will be an additional 30-50% faster.

 

[Thala]

It's not as powerful as the GFlops suggests. On Qualcomm's own tests they claimed the Adreno 685 in the 8cx is 20-25% faster in Night Raid compared to UHD 620 graphics systems.

8cx only has Adreno 680, which is well below 2 TFlops. Its only the Microsoft SQ1 containing Adreno 685 with 2.1TFlops.
In addition Night Raid is a bad reference for Adreno performance, as the Qualcomm DX12 drivers are not very optimized - at least thats my exprience with the Adreno DX12 drivers - in general i expect the Adreno 685 to significantly outperform both Icelake Gen11 and Ryzen U SoCs under optimized drivers.