TwelveSilverSwords

joined 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

https://x.com/Tech_Reve/status/1730417341937443164?s=20

"Qualcomm is easily surpassing Apple.

The 8G4, consuming 8 watts of power, achieves a multi-score exceeding 10k on GB6, and the GPU is also remarkable"

This is groundbreaking efficiency. Incredible.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Side question, Intel and Apple are the only companies who can integrate Thunderbolt controllers directly into their SoCs, am I right?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Samsung and Intel have the tech to replace TSMC, but they do not have the volume.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

The die size of the X Elite is ~ 170 mm².

That's far less than the M3 Max's 400+ mm².

What thus nears is the two are in completely different tiers in terms of price.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

You are mistaken.

-45 TOPS is for the NPU alone. The combined value of CPU, GPU, BPU is 75 TOPS.
-45 TOPS is for 8-bit (INT8) precision.

Go watch the event again.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Qualcomm, Samsung and Mediatek are there only options.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Yeah. I mean for now, the X Elite is their best and highest end offering. But I do believe Qualcomm will release higher tier chips like "X Super" and "X Ultra" in the future.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Yeah. I mean for now, the X Elite is their best and highest end offering. But I do believe Qualcomm will release higher tier chips like "X Super" and "X Ultra" in the future.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (7 children)

There are 4 companies in the world that make 5G modems:

Qualcomm.
Samsung.
Mediatek.
Huawei.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (5 children)

Yes but M3 Max is a different class of product.

It's like saying Ryzen 7945HX decimated the Ryzen 7950HS.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (10 children)

Does this sub hate the Snapdragon X Elite or something?

 

Several SoCs/APUs released recently come with an integrated AI engine.

Ryzen 7040 -> 10 TOPS XDNA AI Engine.

Snapdragon X Elite -> 45 TOPS Hexagon NPU

Apple M3 -> 18 TOPS Neural Engine

The soon to be released Intel Meteor Lake will also have an NPU.

How do these TOPS figures compare to GPUs such as the RTX 40 series models? They are notoriously being used for AI computation. But I haven't been able to find any TOPS figures for those dGPUs.

I want to know how these integrated NPUs stand against dGPUs in AI computation power.

 

For like the last decade in the PC industry, things have been pretty boring. Intel was the major player in CPU, and Nvidia was the major player in GPUs, while AMD existed as the minor player in both sectors (in terms of marketshare). There were also some other players like Qualcomm, which supplied ARM CPU based SoCs, but their presence was nigh negligible.

However, recently Intel has officially entered the dGPU market with Intel Arc Xe Graphics. It has also allowed Intel to greatly bolster their iGPU performance.

Then recently there was a report that Nvidia is going to enter the PC CPU sector.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/nvidia-make-arm-based-pc-chips-major-new-challenge-intel-2023-10-23/

Nvidia's CPU will be based on the ARM architecture. With their leading GPU technology, there is the possibility of Nvidia making a formidable SoC with integrated RTX Graphics. It's not clear if Nvidia will use ARM's reference Cortex cores or design their own custom cores. Even if it's the former, I think it's still going to be pretty competitive, as ARM's reference designs have greatly improved in recent years.

And then there is Qualcomm who has just announced the Sanpdragon X Elite SoC for laptops

https://www.anandtech.com/show/21112/qualcomm-snapdragon-x-elite-performance-preview-a-first-look-at-whats-to-come

Utilising their own custom-ARM based Oryon CPUs, Qualcomm has created a formidable SoC.. The single-core performance exceeds the Ryzen 9 7950X. Qualcomm has been making ARM CPUs for a while now, with the Snapdragon 8c and 7c series. However, looking it's clear Qualcomm wasn't taking them very seriously. The Snapdragon X Elite is different, and it looks like Qualcomm is looking to make a bang. And it seems they will, as all major Laptop OEMs have partnered with Qualcomm to make laptops with X Elite SoC.

It's also been rumoured that Samsung and Mediatek will make ARM SoCs for PCs. It's clear that Windows on ARM is taking off.

Then there is the AI PC. On device AI is going to become a major thing in PCs going forward, with upcoming processors from Intel, AMD and Qualcomm all having dedicated processing units for hardware acceleration of AI.

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Summary

The PC hardware industry is going to become a very interesting and exciting place in the coming years. Intel has entered the PC dGPU space, Nvidia will reportedly enter the PC CPU space and Qualcomm is looking to become major force in the industry with their Snapdragon X processors. Windows on ARM is taking off, and the era of the AI PC is here.

 

For much of the 2010s, we were stuck with mainly dual-core and quad-core CPUs in PCs. However the arrival of Ryzen shook the PC industry, causing a rapid increase in core counts. At the time, there was fervent discussion on this matter, with many questioning if more cores were worth it, and how many cores are more than enough?

So how do things stand today? The latest Intel and AMD consumer processors top out at 24 and 16 cores respectively. What extent of modern software can take advantage of all those cores? What modern workloads are still bottlenecked by single threaded performance?

 

So there are many companies offering WiFi chips: Intel, Mediatek, Qualcomm, Realtek etc... who makes the best ones?

I am sorry if this question sounds stupid, because in the tech world it's best to compare the products themselves, not the brand. However I am not familiar with how this sector of the hardware industry works and product lines of each company. So I hope your answers can enlighten me and others in the same boat.

 

Things are getting exciting in the Windows on ARM space, with Qualcomm's announcement of the Snapdragon X Elite supercharged by the custom Oryon CPU and rumours that AMD and Nvidia will make ARM CPUs for PC.

The hardware is coming together nicely, but the software side is still... pretty bad?

There are few native apps for WoA. That wouldn't be a problem if there was a good x86 emulator, but there isn't.

Why can't Microsoft make an emulator like Apple's Rosetta2 ?

I have heard various reasons such as Microsoft not fully commiting to it, that Apple Silicon contains hardware acceleration for Rosetta2, that a hardware accelerated x86 emulator would result in patent violations, that Microsoft uses a generic emulator whereas Apple uses a translator etc...

So why doesn't Microsft create something like Rosetta2 ? Will they eventually make one? Will it be as good as Rosetta2 ? And will it finally make Windows on ARM viable?

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