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Comment by dagmx | Hacker News Reader

It’s been interesting seeing the difference in architecture play out in benchmarks.

For context, there was a lot of hullabaloo a while ago when the Adreno 730 was posting super impressive benchmarks, outpacing Apple’s GPU and putting up a good fight against AMD and NVIDIA’s lower/mid range cards.

Since then, with the Snapdragon X, there’s been a bit of a deflation which has shown the lead flip dramatically when targeting more modern graphics loads. The Adreno now ranks behind the others when it comes to benchmarks that reflect desktop gaming, including being behind Apple’s GPU.

It’ll be interesting to see how Qualcomm moves forward with newer GPU architectures. Whether they’ll sacrifice their mobile lead in the pursuit of gaining ground for higher end gaming.

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I'm not surprised the Adreno numbers didn't hold up as well as the rest of the Snapdragon benchmarks. Back in 2013 the Dolphin team blogged about their terrible experiences with the Adreno drivers and vendor support[1]. Ten years later in 2023, the same team blogged about how those same continuing issues led them to completely replace the official Adreno driver with a userland alternative[2].

As it stands today, the only credible names in ARM SOC GPUs seem to be Apple (M chips) & Nvidia (Tegra chips).

[1]: https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2013/09/26/dolphin-emulator-and...

[2]: https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2023/08/13/dolphin-progress-rep...

Kudos to the Dolphin website developers for keeping 10+ years of blogs & hyperlinks fully functional and properly tagged. They always produce great reading material!

Can you point to any Tegra data showing that it’s actually competitive with Apple?

I just searched and don’t see that.

I don't have any data. I'm speaking strictly with the knowledge that Tegra X1 powers the Nintendo Switch and that the Nintendo Switch has a broad base of engine support. Normally, if it were a bad platform to work on, I expect that we'd have heard about it by now from third party developers (e.g.: CELL architecture)

> As it stands today, the only credible names in ARM SOC GPUs seem to be Apple (M chips) & Nvidia (Tegra chips).

I've been out of this space for years, so my knowledge is definitely stale, but have Mali GPUs fallen out?

Mali has decent coverage. The pixel phones use them and so do a lot of mediatek based low-mid range devices.

> Whether they’ll sacrifice their mobile lead in the pursuit of gaining ground for higher end gaming.

It's hard to imagine why they'd distract themselves with that, except perhaps with a token small-run demo for pure brand marketing purposes.

Because of Apple's strict vertical integration, there's so much market for them as the de facto manufacturer delivering parts to pretty much every competitor making products that want a high performance/power ratio.

Well it depends which space they want to be taken seriously in. Currently the 741 is very poor when compared to any dGPU or Apple. It only favourably compares to iGPUs.

I believe they have three options

1. Say it’s meant to be like an iGPU, and work on supporting dGPUs to complement it.

2. Say that they want to compete with dGPUs/Apple and risk losing their mobile crown. Which is what Apple did in exchange for one design across all products.

3. Say they want to have a split product portfolio. A more desktop focused GPU for Snapdragon X with a more mobile centric one for 8xx

I think it's going to be 3, but a split between mobile and laptop/desktop without any concern for competing with dGPUs. It makes no sense at all for them to.

If they can give good enough, on par or better with current iGPUs, with a lower power usage and potentially even fanless, they're going to sell a billion of them. They'll be in every Chromebook in the world.

They aren't gunning for Chromebook deployments...these are currently in business laptop models and AMD may have already beaten them in all fronts on some of these per dollar other than ultralight and video playback duration. Lenovo has a A model that can do 16 hours and light gaming. more importantly it runs x86 apps full speed.

I agree these likely will take over the sub $1000 market if given the chance but they are shooting at $1500-2000

Interesting. Seems like a huge missed opportunity there, as those outsell everything else by quite a margin.

Perhaps they'll expand into both ends like they do phones, eg the 4xx on the low end and 8xx on the high end.

Presumably the margins on Chromebook are terrible compared to those of mid to high end laptops. I don't blame them for wanting to start with the higher margin market and eventually work down.

Chromebooks are basically the US school systems, Google employees, and little else.

They aren’t fighting for Chromebook territory with this though.

All their comparisons are to the MacBook Air and mid-high end windows laptops because that’s the market they’re gunning for. These are meant to be $1k-2k devices.

IIRC, on the LTT video on the topic they mentioned that there were like 8 extra PCIe lanes that could theoretically get run to a dGPU

I grew up in San Diego and at the time being involved with technology meant living in Qualcomm’s shadow in one way or another.

So I tend to agree that being the reference mobile SoC vendor outside of Cupertino is pretty on brand for their absolute top priority. At Qualcomm if it doesn’t make dollars it doesn’t make sense as we used to say.

And good for them! After a brief flirtation with the idea of becoming a pure play CDMA patent troll they seem to have gotten back to their roots and started doing engineering again. It’s a cool company.

I think there is a market for a dual-world architecture, with loads of dark silicon in a low battery setting (and suffering performance being acceptable) and a high power mode, that is able to compete with regular desktop gpu architectures.

> It's hard to imagine why they'd distract themselves with that, except perhaps with a token small-run demo for pure brand marketing purposes.

haven't google and samsung started making their own socs?

To me it seems as if the selling points of these latest snapdragon chips is high efficiency/battery life and competitive performance, so given the efficiency angle it makes less sense to try to make gaming machines out of them right now. Maybe in the future there will be a gaming oriented snapdragon less concerned about battery life.

The Mobile lead and gaining ground for higher end gaming are aligned in many areas so you have to do both.

HALF of X1's compute is F16 only which is absolutely wasted silicon for most desktop games.

Their entire tiling setup is great for simple mobile games, but (as shown in the article) is also an inefficient approach for desktop games.

64-wide SIMD works well in simple games and offers a FAR better theoretical compute per area, but when things get more complex, it's hard to keep everything filled. This is why Intel is 8-wide, Nvidia is 32-wide, and AMD is 32/32x2/64-wide (and is one reason why the second SIMD didn't improve performance like the theoretical flops said it should).

With the release of the M-series chips, Apple's GPUs stopped ramping up performance as quickly on the simple mobile benchmarks. This is very clear with A17 in Aztec not only falling behind the SD8gen3, but the SD8gen2 too. At the same time, GPU perf/watt has also lagged behind. However, when you switch to something like the somewhat more complex Solar Bay, the Apple GPU pulls ahead.

This is similar to the AMD/Nvidia swap from gaming to hard compute then slowly back to gaming after they split into server and gaming designs.

In some areas sure, but it’s really down to what you’re dedicating silicon to in terms of capabilities.

How so? I'm fairly confused about what you're implying. Is Apple sacrificing mobile capabilities for better desktop capability, for example?

Yes.

Assuming that a GPU size and node is similar between different GPUs, then different features which require silicon do it at the expense of other features. It’s always a balancing act.

That’s effectively the big rub between NVIDIA and AMD today with raytracing + tensor support vs pure raster+compute throughput.

Apple just went through a major GPU architecture change [1]. They focused a ton on maximizing for AAA game usage and followed the NVIDIA route to bias towards where they think things are going. At least according to the simplified architecture diagrams for both Apple graphics and Adreno, Apple has more raytracing silicon than Adreno.

It also supports stuff that doesn’t require silicon but does have effects on GPU design like mesh shading or their new dynamic caching that improves occupancy for high draw count games with large uber shaders.

Compared to Adreno that focused more on raw triangle throughput instead, but doesn’t scale as well with complexity. It performs much better on mobile benchmarks that fit that usage pattern, but falls behind with desktop benchmarks that follow Apple’s priorities.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/tech-talks/111375

I always thought the road to Ray-Tracing is wrong on mobile. At least in its current form or iteration. But then Apple decided to go with it, I would have expected they have something new. But turns out not.

I think the tail is wagging the dog here. Those mobile workloads are tuned towards what currently works.

If Apple or Qualcomm pull off desktop features in a mobile power envelope then the industry would happily adjust.

I think that assumes that most games are targeting higher end graphics and are held back.

The majority of played mobile games would be the same as they are today imho even if you could achieve 4090 performance in that power envelope.

Is there any reason why these ARM iGPUs are so much worse than iGPUs from Intel and AMD? My 11th gen Intel CPU's Xe graphics completely outpaces my M1 Mac's and something like a Ryzen 5 5600G destroys both.

I’m curious what benchmark you’re looking at. The M1 is a very competitive iGPU that is competitive with an Nvidia 1650.

Are you looking at pure gaming performance and are you sure it’s not going through a translation layer?

To quote Anandtech (https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...)

> Overall, the M1’s GPU starts off very strong here. At both Normal and High settings it’s well ahead of any other integrated GPU, and even a discrete Radeon RX 560X. Only once we get to NVIDIA’s GTX 1650 and better does the M1 finally run out of gas.

No benchmarks, just based on personal usage. I think I found the issue after posting that comment though, which is macOS's unhelpful deprecation of openGL support. The games that I play on macOS used OpenGL and will probably never implement Metal which is a shame. They were Apple Silicon native though, no translation. Games in question are Factorio and RuneScape.

Ah yeah it’s possible individual games do perform poorly.

But in a general sense the integrated GPU in the M series processors is closer in competition to a low/mid discrete GPU than the integrated GPUs in other brands.

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