Discussion Qualcomm Snapdragon Thread

[FlameTail]

Snapdragon X Elite vs Intel Core Ultra 7 155H: We ran the benchmarks

Intel stole the show at CES, but Qualcomm was there to say it's still coming for them

www.xda-developers.com

X Elite compared to Core 7 Ultra H155

X Elite has much better CPU performance and efficiency.

GPU performance in benchmarks looks good, but in real life applications it may not be as good.

 

[SpudLobby]

Snapdragon X Elite vs Intel Core Ultra 7 155H: We ran the benchmarks

Intel stole the show at CES, but Qualcomm was there to say it's still coming for them

www.xda-developers.com

X Elite compared to Core 7 Ultra H155

X Elite has much better CPU performance and efficiency.

GPU performance in benchmarks looks good, but in real life applications it may not be as good.

We’ve been over this, but keep in mind those “TDP” figures are about the heat and device profile’s capability for long term cooling from Qualcomm — for those two laptops — not the power consumption directly while those results are ongoing.

That said it might loosely track but Andrei has said they’d only correlate after like 30 minutes of running, in other words I think the 3.4GHz 12-core boost for that B Config in the 23W laptop is not actually the 23W power consumption in these short runs.

Here it’s probably running higher for the 23W config. Not saying I don’t think it’s less prone to throttling and still drastically more efficient, but I do not think that the Config A with all cores running at 3.8GHz vs Config B with all cores running at 3.4GHz — that 10% difference in MT performance can’t imply the 23W -> 80W power gap the way people are taking this lol, nor do most of the graphs show only 10% more perf from 23W to 50-60W (granted they are GB6 MT though).

The device (not chip per se) TDPs are about long term cooling. We really don’t know what the chips in those laptops (so package, DRAM, power delivery minus statics) are actively consuming during these tests — we know what the MT curves look like from 10-60W vs Intel’s 14-core 13800H, 10/12 core RPL-U/P charts they gave us from GB6 though.

https://komputerbasic.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/snapdragon-x-elite-vs-intel-14-core.webp

 

[SpudLobby]

People should stick to these two for now (and fwiw here at least for GB6, notably it looks more like the peak platform power for a CPU load is around 50-60W)

https://i.pcmag.com/imagery/articles/04h3nvv9B0G8lnBQWgXOvpt-4.fit_lim.size_1050x.jpg

https://i.pcmag.com/imagery/articles/04h3nvv9B0G8lnBQWgXOvpt-6.fit_lim.size_1050x.jpg

 

[FlameTail]

Inside Qualcomm’s Adreno 530, a Small Mobile iGPU

GPU architectures vary drastically depending on their primary use cases. Mobile designs like Qualcomm’s Adreno face a daunting set of challenges, with smaller power and area budgets than even…

chipsandcheese.com

C&C takes a look at the Adreno GPU of the Snapdragon 820.

 

[FlameTail]

AMD has like 15-20% marketshare in laptops.

How good of a chance does Qualcomm have in surpassing that?

 

[soresu]

How good of a chance does Qualcomm have in surpassing that?

Probably dependent on ARM64 ports of major Windows software.

AMD taking back market share was just about executing well and developing good partnerships in the OEM space.

For Qualcomm it's definitely going to be more of a software centric uphill battle combined with a need for competitive pricing.

 

[SpudLobby]

Probably dependent on ARM64 ports of major Windows software.

AMD taking back market share was just about executing well and developing good partnerships in the OEM space.

For Qualcomm it's definitely going to be more of a software centric uphill battle combined with a need for competitive pricing.

I agree it’s about software now more than anything else.

Not disagreeing on hardware but just a monologue of optimism on partnerships:

I think one thing to remember is that previously they had bad products. Now they have something really, really good, and the fact that MS is reportedly throwing it in the Surface Pro and Surface Laptop is telling as to both the confidence and scalability. Second thing is Ian Cutress suggested ~17 designs are coming at Computex, and Charlie at Semiaccurate pointed in the direction of various OEM design wins, and rumored Xiaomi laptops with it or Dell making an XPS-style laptop which they didn’t even do with AMD.

Lastly their market target is a bit different — restricted — they’re not going after the budget or midrange, nor workstation laptops with regular DDR, nor are they going after beefy gaming laptops primarily — it’s mainly premium in the 15-45W range, with most in the 25-45W ultrabook class.

That in mind, “just” say 15-20 total design wins if they’re the *right* kinds of wins by the end of 2024 is huge for them. People will mock it (limited aggregate wins) without thinking through it but their market is different.

Other thing to remember is Qualcomm already does a lot of co-engineering and partnership with mobile phone firms on expedited time scales so if the demand is there I bet they’ll have the resources to cooperate. Basically, I am very optimistic.

I also again suspect Dell or HP will actually have a true premium XPS/Spectre (not the same branding because of Intel) with it by 2025. Right now for AMD they don’t really do this, at best HP has a Pavilion Plus or Aero and a middling Envy model that wasn’t updated, but it doesn’t get much exposure, Dell is MIA.

And in North America, AMD is a joke for premium availability. Qualcomm getting two Surface products and Lenovo to release one or two different Yoga or Slim laptops here is alone massive

 

[SpudLobby]

https://x.com/dnystedt/status/1635075230061436929?s=46

RE: Dell.

Dell is on the partner list they gave, and Qualcomm have more resources to aid this. Strikes me as totally believable that Dell would be interested in X Elite/Future QC stuff to hedge but not so much AMD — development costs for this stuff are nontrivial to begin with so probably without AMD footing the bill they weren’t going to move much over AMD being a bit ahead with Intel likely to get back to “good enough”, whereas QC being a leap ahead is something to keep an eye on.

 

[SpudLobby]

For Qualcomm it's definitely going to be more of a software centric uphill battle combined with a need for competitive pricing.

RE: pricing, one thing that occurs to me is their RAM is probably on-package. Not package on package like with a phone where it’s directly over, but like with the M1 where it’s beside the SoC on some substrate or whatever.

They only list one DRAM kind — (up to 64GB) of LPDDR5x 8533, which is also exactly the kind you’d want to for if you’re going to go on-package for area and probably marginal(?) power savings.

Does add cost but probably not even that expensive to do in the grand scheme given there are multiple options, but might make SKU availability interesting.


At any rate on cost if they try to price this thing meaningfully above what like Lunar Lake (with the same RAM) costs, or Strix Point, yeah that’ll be dumb even though it’ll be better. You can’t be doing the value proposition that was the 8cx Gen 3 in crappy $1200+ 1080P Lenovo Ultrabooks.

But a bit more than MTL or a 7840U/HS? I expect that, but that’s no big deal because evidently muh “Phoenix expensive” and same for MTL is exaggerated.

 

[FlameTail]

I think one thing to remember is that previously they had bad products. Now they have something really, really good, and the fact that MS is reportedly throwing it in the Surface Pro and Surface Laptop is telling as to both the confidence and scalability. Second thing is Ian Cutress suggested ~17 designs are coming at Computex, and Charlie at Semiaccurate pointed in the direction of various OEM design wins, and rumored Xiaomi laptops with it or Dell making an XPS-style laptop which they didn’t even do with AMD.

Looking forward to those 17 laptops, and hopefully they will be available right after being announced, unlike AMD stuff which takes 6 months to get to any meaningful market availability.

Lastly their market target is a bit different — restricted — they’re not going after the budget or midrange, nor workstation laptops with regular DDR, nor are they going after beefy gaming laptops primarily — it’s mainly premium in the 15-45W range, with most in the 25-45W ultrabook class.

They really should get some designs under $1000. The $750-$1000 upper midrange segment commands a huge sales volume.

That in mind, “just” say 15-20 total design wins if they’re the *right* kinds of wins by the end of 2024 is huge for them. People will mock it (limited aggregate wins) without thinking through it but their market is different.

Other thing to remember is Qualcomm already does a lot of co-engineering and partnership with mobile phone firms on expedited time scales so if the demand is there I bet they’ll have the resources to cooperate. Basically, I am very optimistic.

Qualcomm is rich. They make more money than AMD and even Nvidia.

I also again suspect Dell or HP will actually have a true premium XPS/Spectre (not the same branding because of Intel) with it by 2025. Right now for AMD they don’t really do this, at best HP has a Pavilion Plus or Aero and a middling Envy model that wasn’t updated, but it doesn’t get much exposure, Dell is MIA.

Interesting. You think the likes of Dell will create an entire new lineup of laptops to put the Snapdragon X chips in, instead of plopping it into their existing laptop models?

 

[FlameTail]

RE: pricing, one thing that occurs to me is their RAM is probably on-package. Not package on package like with a phone where it’s directly over, but like with the M1 where it’s beside the SoC on some substrate or whatever.

I speculated just as much in a previous page of this thread (or was it in the Nuvia thread?).

They only list one DRAM kind — (up to 64GB) of LPDDR5x 8533, which is also exactly the kind you’d want to for if you’re going to go on-package for area and probably marginal(?) power savings.

Does add cost but probably not even that expensive to do in the grand scheme given there are multiple options, but might make SKU availability interesting.

God forbid, they should not make an 8 GB SKU. Minimum I'll tolerate 12 GB.

At any rate on cost if they try to price this thing meaningfully above what like Lunar Lake (with the same RAM) costs, or Strix Point, yeah that’ll be dumb even though it’ll be better. You can’t be doing the value proposition that was the 8cx Gen 3 in crappy $1200+ 1080P Lenovo Ultrabooks.

X Elite will arrive in the nick of time, before Strix Point, Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake Mobile come to market. Hence X Elite's competition at launch will be MTL and Hawk Point. Qualcomm should strive their best to make the best impression they can. Something akin to the "Apple M1 sensation".

 

[eek2121]

Qualcomm is rich. They make more money than AMD and even Nvidia.

Not according to their earnings reports, unless you are comparing cash on hand and not revenue or margins. NVIDIA had over 18 billion in revenue for last quarter earnings. Qualcomm had 8.7 billion and AMD had 5.8 billion, so while yes it is true AMD doesn’t make as much, both Qualcomm and AMD combined don’t match NVIDIA, and AMD is growing quite quickly. I suspect that AMD will overtake Qualcomm very soon provided this AI bubble continues.

Remember that it wasn’t long ago that AMD was teetering on bankruptcy.

 

[SpudLobby]

I speculated just as much in a previous page of this thread (or was it in the Nuvia thread?).

God forbid, they should not make an 8 GB SKU. Minimum I'll tolerate 12 GB.

X Elite will arrive in the nick of time, before Strix Point, Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake Mobile come to market. Hence X Elite's competition at launch will be MTL and Hawk Point. Qualcomm should strive their best to make the best impression they can. Something akin to the "Apple M1 sensation".

It will probably arrive 2 quarters (possible 3 quarters if things go wrong) before Lunar Lake is available in a few systems in NA. Probably same for Arrow Lake yeah.

Strix I think will be even longer functionally speaking — for the same target market and especially in North America.

So they’ve got time to make an impression and get 10-20 really good design wins available which is enough.

But 2025 will be the first full year of the X Elite availability and then they will be taking on Arrow Lake, Lunar Lake and Strix Point (TBD on North America with Strix lol but). Ultimately it needs to still be competitive on performance, and meaningfully better efficiency and battery life if it’s more expensive. Alternatively, in theory it could be even less expensive than Strix, LNL, or Arrow Lake with the same RAM, because those are all larger die sizes *and or* are on newer nodes but we’ll see

 

[SpudLobby]

No way they’ll do 8/12GB of RAM. I will bet against that. It will be 16GB+. Not sure what the jumps will be, but:

16
32
64
Are guaranteed

With a *maybe* on 48 and 24 seems right.

Will bet against 8 and 12 though.

 

[SpudLobby]

A good litmus test will be: is there a system with:
13-14 inch
2-2.8K and 400+ nit
512GB PCIE 4
16GB RAM
X Elite system for $1600 and under? And a 32/1TB version for $2000 and under?

You can find MTL laptops with ~ good build like above with 32/1TB LPPDR & PCIE4 for $1299 today.
Lunar Lake would inflate that by like $200-300 for Asus I bet, but even at $1599 if we imagine that, it’s good. I think Qualcomm could get away with another $200 above that for comparable systems, but I don’t think so if it’s like $600 more. They can be above Intel and AMD to a degree but trying to go 90% of the way to Apple will end badly.

 

[SpudLobby]

Looking forward to those 17 laptops, and hopefully they will be available right after being announced, unlike AMD stuff which takes 6 months to get to any meaningful market availability.

They really should get some designs under $1000. The $750-$1000 upper midrange segment commands a huge sales volume.

I don’t think we’ll see a sub-$1000 laptop with the X Elite without a sale or Costco. I think we could see an MSRP $1200 +-100 ish one with like a really good commoditized 2.5/2.8K LED display, decent to good build, and 16GB of RAM/512GB starting.

Volume is important though even without profit because it helps drive amortization of fixed costs and economies of scale along with buoy the Arm ecosystem, so yeah I think it’s a mistake if there isn’t a single laptop below 1500 by 2025 lol.

Qualcomm is rich. They make more money than AMD and even Nvidia.

Interesting. You think the likes of Dell will create an entire new lineup of laptops to put the Snapdragon X chips in, instead of plopping it into their existing laptop models?

Probably, for new branding reasons for one thing, and more importantly because Intel owns the XPS lineup. They do a lot of co-engineering. This is a big reason why they beat AMD for ultrabooks particularly with HP and Dell or even some Lenovo stuff wrt availability.

 

[FlameTail]

Probably, for new branding reasons for one thing, and more importantly because Intel owns the XPS lineup. They do a lot of co-engineering. This is a big reason why they beat AMD for ultrabooks particularly with HP and Dell or even some Lenovo stuff wrt availability.

XPS lineup is co-engineered with Intel? Intriguing. So what would a Qualcomm co-engineered lineup be named? XQS perhaps?

Also on another note- Qualcomm is a major investor in Frore Systems. Perhaps they can coordinate with both Frore and OEMs to get AirJets into Snapdragon laptops.

 

[SpudLobby]

XPS lineup is co-engineered with Intel? Intriguing. So what would a Qualcomm co-engineered lineup be named? XQS perhaps?

Also on another note- Qualcomm is a major investor in Frore Systems. Perhaps they can coordinate with both Frore and OEMs to get AirJets into Snapdragon laptops.

Dude seriously? Haha. Intel has done co-engineering and footed bills in some way for years — that’s part of what Evo is.

Intel's next-gen Meteor Lake CPUs: A game-changing 40-year architectural shift to rival Apple

A new generation of power efficiency and graphical prowess.

www.windowscentral.com

They still do this to varying degrees if not moreso.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AMDLaptops/s/d0680U0L5G

Anything Athena/Evo - simply not going to happen should be your baseline assumption.

Why do you think there would be a rumor about Dell doing a separate division for Qualcomm? Heavily involved with the fact that they probably can’t reuse IP or resources from Intel on laptop designs, and that these things — ultrabooks specifically — require some care too, not as much neurotic stuff as Apple fans think but cheaping out on an SoC’s packaging/power delivery or like an SSD, Wireless cards can mar an otherwise great experience. And you’re just working with less literal physical legroom, too.

No way it’s as difficult as with phones but I doubt laptop OEMs have the same engineers or resources that Samsung’s mobile or Apple’s mobile phone divisions do.

Besides supply, AMD’s priority to working on gaming laptops for AMD advantage and such, and then selling to gaming crap is why their ultrabook distribution sucks and why it took so long to even see more than a few ultrabooks.

 

[moinmoin]

An X Elite board for Framework would be neat. Even better if it not only supports 13 but 16 (including GPU expansions) as well.

 

[FlameTail]

I wonder if it was Intel's idea to ditch the 2nd M.2 SSD slot, solder the RAM, make the function keys capacitive and turn touchpad invisible in the entire 2024 XPS lineup...

 

[FlameTail]

RE: pricing, one thing that occurs to me is their RAM is probably on-package. Not package on package like with a phone where it’s directly over, but like with the M1 where it’s beside the SoC on some substrate or whatever.

I just remembered a Qualcommm represetative saying something which alluded to this. I recall posting that information on the previous Nuvia discussion thread.

 

[FlameTail]

https://x.com/QaM_Section31/status/1749810504498122787?s=20

According to rumors from Weibo, initial measured power consumption data of Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 which is supposed to use Oryon CPU seems to be... not good.

- Single P-core : 5.47 W
- Dual P-core : 9.32 W
- Single E-core : 1.1 W
- All-core Total : 14.2 W

A17 Pro data for comparison;


5.47W for Oryon P-core seems decent.

14W all core power consumption is also solid, in line with A17 Pro.

However- what's concerning is the 1.1W power consumption of the Oryon-E core..

It's absurd how ludicrously efficient Apple's E cores are.

 

[Nothingness]

5.47W for Oryon P-core seems decent.

14W all core power consumption is also solid, in line with A17 Pro.

However- what's concerning is the 1.1W power consumption of the Oryon-E core..

It's absurd how ludicrously efficient Apple's E cores are.

I can't remember, but isn't the Oryon E core a P core with lower frequency (and likely other changes but nothing radical)? If that's the case, it is to be expected and I guess they are working on something more efficient for future generations.

 

[FlameTail]

Also the power efficiency of the X Elite iGPU looks bad in comparison to Apple.

More power than M2 Pro while delivering less performance?

And it's not like the GPU has been pushed to oblivion. The power curve (as presented in the Qualcomm slide), looks very healthy.

Last picture was sourced from here: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple...re-efficient-the-CPU-not-always.699140.0.html

So it's only their P-core which is competitive with Apple. Their E-core isn't (going by the rumour), and neither is their GPU as per the information presented here.

Qualcomm is in deep trouble.

 

[Nothingness]

Qualcomm is in deep trouble.

You went from Qualcomm will take over the world to that conclusion. What about waiting for real products availability and reviews before being so affirmative?