KITA

jdb8167 said:

KITA said:

In terms of GPU, DSP (AI) and modem, Qualcomm already has Apple beat, so I'm not sure why this is such a mystery to everyone, CPU is their main bottleneck.

Any evidence that Qualcomm has Apple beat in GPU, DSP and Neural Engine? I haven't seen any. Apple right now has the fastest integrated GPU and the M1 Neural Engine is impressive. We know less about Apple's DSP but I doubt that Qualcomm is ahead there either.

The peak configuration of an Adreno 6xx in laptops, a GPU from 2018 on a 7 nm process, is >2.1 TFLOPS (estimated at 2.2~2.4 TFLOPS in the SQ2). In 2018, the 7 core GPU in the A12X on 7nm was ~1.4 TFLOPS. Where as Apple's 8 core M1 GPU from 2020 on 5 nm offers about 2.6 TFLOPS. Needless to say, a modern Adreno 7xx GPU for laptop SoCs on a 5 nm process should exceed Apple's GPU.

The M1 with the Neural Engine offers 11 TOPS while the Snapdragon 888 with the Hexagon 780 DSP offers 26 TOPS (32 TOPS in the Plus version) for AI applications.

apple_evo said:

reading the comments here is pretty sobering. 

1. QUALCOMM already makes laptop chips (for Microsoft) - Microsoft SQ1 and SQ2 

2. Windows 10 ARM64 exists and runs quite well. Old versions of Windows on ARM (Windows RT) were terrible failures. 

All that being said, Apple's M1 is running circles around the SQ1/SQ2 chips and runs Windows 10 ARM faster in emulation mode than the SQ1/SQ2 natively, which is very impressive. 

I don't think people really know what the SQ1/SQ2 are (I'd also add that Qualcomm makes the Snapdragon 7c, 8c and 8cx SoCs from other OEMs to use.).

For context, they use 4x Kyro 495 Gold and 4x Kyro 495 Silver cores. These are essentially the Cortex A76 and Cortex A55 cores from 2018 and 2017 respectively. All of this is on a 7 nm (TSMC N7) process.

The Apple M1 uses 4x Firestorm and 4x Icestorm cores from 2020 on a 5 nm (TSMC N5) process.

It's no surprise the M1 is far more powerful in CPU performance than the SQ1/SQ2, they're using really old tech.



For comparison, a modern stock Arm chip for laptops will use 8x Cortex X2 (Armv9) cores on 5 nm.



Single core Cortex-X2 would still lose out to Apple, but multi core would likely be higher in this configuration.

We might expect to see this from companies like MediaTek (paired with an NVIDIA GPU), Samsung (paired with an AMD GPU) and possibly Qualcomm (paired with an Adreno GPU) later this year / early next year.

There's likely a good reason to Qualcomm's $1.4 billion purchase of NUVIA given their first product will only come to market in 2022. This is also the same year new cores from Arm's Sophia design team comes to market - so it would be safe to assume Qualcomm is under the impression their NUVIA cores will beat those too.

If NUVIA's performance claims are true, the Phoenix will be quite competitive right out of the box:



In terms of GPU, DSP (AI) and modem, Qualcomm already has Apple beat, so I'm not sure why this is such a mystery to everyone, CPU is their main bottleneck.

As far as OS goes, they're already working closely with Microsoft for Windows 11 on ARM.

AppleInsider said:

Microsoft also says that it wants to encourage open commerce on its operating system. It will allow apps downloaded from the Windows Store to have independent commerce systems within the app. This differs from Apple's requirements to tie in-app purchases from App Store apps to Apple's commerce system.

That's quite the contrast to Apple. Microsoft will collect 0% if a developer brings their own commerce system.

thedba said:

After the M1 power bombed everyone in the legacy Wintel world, Microsoft announced that they had started working on their own custom ARM chip. 
Not surprised that many Windows projects are being relegated to the back burner. 

Microsoft's custom Arm chip development is aimed at Azure to compete with Amazon's AWS.

Graviton2, based on Neoverse N1, is already around 15% of AWS instances and offers customers up to 40% better price performance than a traditional x86 instance.



Meanwhile, Graviton3 will likely be based on Neoverse N2 (Armv9) cores later this year.



To top it off, other server Arm CPUs, such as the Ampere Altra (80 core) already offer some compelling performance compared to x86 offerings from Intel/AMD.



If anything, Microsoft is waiting for Qualcomm's NUVIA based Arm chip for high performance laptops in 2022.