Qualcomm Snapdragon is reaching parity with Apple Silicon

[Retskrad]

Article


Thoughts? Apple has rested on their laurels ever since the A14 and lost most of their key chip designers. Qualcomm used to be 70% (!) slower in single-core just a few years ago. Now, they have almost reached parity in single-core performance . The impressive thing is, Qualcomm Performance cores only draw 4W (compared to Apple's 5W). On the GPU side of things, Qualcomm got it in the bag. The Snapdragon Gen 2 is already ahead of the A16. This is looking grim for Apple.

 

[Sydde]

One thing that Apple has included in the M-series is a few tiny logic enhancements such as half-byte-carry and TSO, to improve its ability to handle x86 emulation. Those are important issues if MS is planning to get a good quality ARM version of Windows up, as there is still a pretty big need to run/translate x86-based code. We shall see if Snapdragon will be able to handle this lift.

 

[jdb8167]

Article


Thoughts? Apple has rested on their laurels ever since the A14 and lost most of their key chip designers. Qualcomm used to be 70% (!) slower in single-core just a few years ago. Now, they have almost reached parity in single-core performance . The impressive thing is, Qualcomm Performance cores only draw 4W (compared to Apple's 5W). On the GPU side of things, Qualcomm got it in the bag. The Snapdragon Gen 2 is already ahead of the A16. This is looking grim for Apple.

Qualcomm's next flagship chipset, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, will supposedly score 1,800 and 6,500 points in Geekbench's single and multi-core tests. It will be manufactured on TSMC's N4P process, and not N3E as proclaimed by some rumours.

My M2 MacBook Air gets 1930 SC and 9000 MC. The latest M2 Max in the 16" MacBook Pro gets 2060 SC and 15300 MC. I'm not sure if 1800 SC and 6500 MC is really very competitive.

I would love for someone to come out with an Apple silicon competitive SoC for the Windows side of the world. It would be good for everyone to break the Intel/AMD duopoly but I don't see it happening in the next couple of years.

Edit: Why are you comparing phone SoCs? Are we talking Apple silicon Macs? Or should this be moved to a more appropriate forum?

 

[salamanderjuice]

My M2 MacBook Air gets 1930 SC and 9000 MC. The latest M2 Max in the 16" MacBook Pro gets 2060 SC and 15300 MC. I'm not sure if 1800 SC and 6500 MC is really very competitive.

I would love for someone to come out with an Apple silicon competitive SoC for the Windows side of the world. It would be good for everyone to break the Intel/AMD duopoly but I don't see it happening in the next couple of years.

The Ryzen 9 7950X gets 2200 SC and 24000 MC. I'm not sure if 2060 SC and 15300 MC is really very competitive.

The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 is going to be a smartphone chip like the A16. Not a laptop or desktop chip. The A16 seems pretty comparable in performance. There's only so much you can pack into a battery power fanless device like a phone. Not really fair to compare the much larger MBA with more space for cooling and battery.

 

[jdb8167]

The Ryzen 9 7950X gets 2200 SC and 24000 MC. I'm not sure if 2060 SC and 15300 MC is really very competitive.

That would be a better topic for this forum though I think there is already a thread somewhere on that topic. I'm pretty sure that the Ryzen 7950X isn't actually available yet (correct me if I'm wrong) so we don't have any good sense of how power hungry it is. I'm eagerly awaiting those results.

 

[salamanderjuice]

You can already buy a 7950X for $600 right now. They are power hungry beasts though with 220W at max. They do still perform pretty well if you cap power consumption. The 7950X 3D variant with a larger cache isn't out yet, perhaps that's what you're thinking of.

 

[jdb8167]

You can already buy a 7950X for $600 right now. They are power hungry beasts though with 220W at max. They do still perform pretty well if you cap power consumption. The 7950X 3D variant with a larger cache isn't out yet, perhaps that's what you're thinking of.

The AMD names are confusing. I was thinking of the upcoming Zen4 laptop CPUs that were announced couple of weeks ago. I should have looked up the names. The 7040 & 7045.

 

[bcortens]

You can already buy a 7950X for $600 right now. They are power hungry beasts though with 220W at max. They do still perform pretty well if you cap power consumption. The 7950X 3D variant with a larger cache isn't out yet, perhaps that's what you're thinking of.

Given that the 7950x has 16 high performance cores it is more of a competitor to what would be an M2 Ultra rather than the M2 Pro/Max.

 

[dgdosen]

2024? A bit of a ways out. Shouldn't we be comparing Apple's future (2023?) M3 with Qualcomm's future (2024?) chip?

No matter - I hope Qualcomm cranks out all sorts of low power Arm chips supported by Windows and Linux. It'll be good for consumers, as we've already passed the point where these chips are powerful enough for 90%+ of most user's computing needs...

 

[salamanderjuice]

Given that the 7950x has 16 high performance cores it is more of a competitor to what would be an M2 Ultra rather than the M2 Pro/Max.

My point was that just like it's stupid to compare desktop chip to a laptop chip it's also stupid to compare a laptop chip to smartphone chip.

 

[bcortens]

The AMD names are confusing. I was thinking of the upcoming Zen4 laptop CPUs that were announced couple of weeks ago. I should have looked up the names. The 7040 & 7045.

I think AMD might be able to win at single core on mobile by using a LOT more power, others in other threads have stated far more clearly why performance per watt is so important but I think a few notes are important. Don't trust the power consumption TDP from AMD/Intel, they lie, the TDP on the tin bears no relation to max and sustained power consumption of their chips. (the 7950x does indeed do 220W peak despite the official TDP being 170W)

• Intel and AMD laptops performance often drops when unplugged from the wall
• While 22 hours battery life is ridiculous, in real world heavy use I only get about 5-6 hours out of my M1 Pro MacBook Pro when regularly compiling with Xcode throughout the day (I also have other bad apps like Teams open which is a power hog). This shows how important PPW is for notebooks. I want to be able to go a full day and maybe soon I'll be able to.
• Peak performance that cannot be sustained quietly in notebooks quietly is also not desirable as I want a nice quiet computer, if you don't care about niceness of the experience you probably don't want a Mac.

Those are just a few reasons to actually care about PPW - but again others have said more.

 

[bcortens]

My point was that just like it's stupid to compare desktop chip to a laptop chip it's also stupid to compare a laptop chip to smartphone chip.

Given that the Qualcomm snapdragon 8 gen 2 is already the base for their windows on ARM laptops I would say the comparison to Apple's M series is fairer than your comparison.

 

[salamanderjuice]

Given that the Qualcomm snapdragon 8 gen 2 is already the base for their windows on ARM laptops I would say the comparison to Apple's M series is fairer than your comparison.

What laptop has the Snapdragon 8 gen 2? AFAIK all the ARM Windows laptops use Snapdragon 8cxs, 7c or some variant of those and not the same literal chip in flagship phones.

 

[bcortens]

What laptop has the Snapdragon 8 gen 2? AFAIK all the ARM Windows laptops use Snapdragon 8cxs, 7c or some variant of those and not the same literal chip in flagship phones.

You're right, the naming is confusing 8cx vs 8.
However the Snapdragon 8 gen 2 is actually using newer core architecture than the 8cx based on my quick googling ...

Edit: Snapdragon core names are pretty awful and its hard to figure out which is the top tier chip.

 

[bobmans]

Isn't the gen 3 the 2024 chip? We're january 2023, they just released the gen 2, I feel like this article is pure speculation.

 

[Love-hate 🍏 relationship]

Article


Thoughts? Apple has rested on their laurels ever since the A14 and lost most of their key chip designers. Qualcomm used to be 70% (!) slower in single-core just a few years ago. Now, they have almost reached parity in single-core performance . The impressive thing is, Qualcomm Performance cores only draw 4W (compared to Apple's 5W). On the GPU side of things, Qualcomm got it in the bag. The Snapdragon Gen 2 is already ahead of the A16. This is looking grim for Apple.

I say that it’s very good

Doesn’t mean apple silicon is bad in any way

But competition is always welcome

 

[Love-hate 🍏 relationship]

You're right, the naming is confusing 8cx vs 8.
However the Snapdragon 8 gen 2 is actually using newer core architecture than the 8cx based on my quick googling ...

Edit: Snapdragon core names are pretty awful and its hard to figure out which is the top tier chip.

8cx gen 2 is crap actually

Based on 8cx gen 1 which itself is based on sd855 , lol

 

[bcortens]

8cx gen 2 is crap actually

Based on 8cx gen 1 which itself is based on sd855 , lol

Yeah so comparing the 8 Gen 2 to the M1 is going to be far fairer than comparing either of the 8cx's to the M1.
At least the 8 Gen 2 has the new ARM X2 core.

 

[Love-hate 🍏 relationship]

My M2 MacBook Air gets 1930 SC and 9000 MC. The latest M2 Max in the 16" MacBook Pro gets 2060 SC and 15300 MC. I'm not sure if 1800 SC and 6500 MC is really very competitive.

I would love for someone to come out with an Apple silicon competitive SoC for the Windows side of the world. It would be good for everyone to break the Intel/AMD duopoly but I don't see it happening in the next couple of years.

Edit: Why are you comparing phone SoCs? Are we talking Apple silicon Macs? Or should this be moved to a more appropriate forum?

Where did you see that the m2 max gets 2060 SC ? That’s very interesting !

 

[Love-hate 🍏 relationship]

Yeah so comparing the 8 Gen 2 to the M1 is going to be far fairer than comparing either of the 8cx's to the M1.
At least the 8 Gen 2 has the new ARM X2 core.

Neither should be compared

We shall wait for the 8cx gen 3

For now there’s no arm chip that can truly compete

 

[apparatchik]

Qualcomm/AMD/Intel et al (Apple too) are not to be trusted when talking about performance benchmarks, you don't buy a chip to use as a paperweight on your desk, you buy or build yourself a device, with specific cooling, thermals, weight, battery life, etc.

If AMD builds a reference tower where they run benchmarks on ideal settings on a data center, but then no shipping product delivers that performance, then it's meaningless. For example, Intel Macs used to face a lot of throttling.

Battery life, performance while unplugged, thinness, and noise are all features and part of the experience of what makes a device. Up to now no mobile chip from AMD or Intel can sustain performance above AS when unplugged due to uncompetitive power consumption. They're either "desktop-replacement" laptops that are not really portable, the battery life is abismal, or the performance halves.

Apple has not updated the Mac Pro yet, the rumored M2 Extreme should show what a top of the line AS chip delivers when power consumption and thermals are not primary concerns.

 

[Joe Dohn]

For now there’s no arm chip that can truly compete

Are you sure about that?
Because in practice, even a Snapdragon can definitely work as a basic desktop.
The power is already there. Samsung's Dex proves it.

It might not be the BEST experience, but you'll definitely be able to handle light documents, some photo editing here and there, maybe even play some emulators.

 

[bcortens]

Neither should be compared

We shall wait for the 8cx gen 3

For now there’s no arm chip that can truly compete

The 8cx gen 2 is out in laptops for purchase today, making it a reasonable comparison.
If we are looking at performance from what Qualcomm is going to be releasing in laptops next the 8 Gen 2 seems a fair point of comparison.

 

[jdb8167]

Where did you see that the m2 max gets 2060 SC ? That’s very interesting !

What's interesting is that the clock on the 16" M2 Max MacBook Pro is 3.68 GHz.

 

[Love-hate 🍏 relationship]

Are you sure about that?
Because in practice, even a Snapdragon can definitely work as a basic desktop.
The power is already there. Samsung's Dex proves it.

It might not be the BEST experience, but you'll definitely be able to handle light documents, some photo editing here and there, maybe even play some emulators.

Oh I agree but for now it’s not fair to compare them as long as QC doesn’t release the true competitor