Snapdragon elite thread

bastibe said:

At the moment, it seems that AMD built the best laptop chip this year. Which is phenomenal, since the last few years arguably didn't have any very good laptop chips at all. And the Snapdragon chip still isn't bad at all, and the upcoming Intel chip will probably be reasonable as well.

However, the rumor mill has it, that next year, both AMD and Nvidia will release their own ARM-based laptop chips. If that's true, exciting times are ahead! Laptop CPUs going from a de-facto monopoly to an open market with four competing vendors can only be a good thing for us consumers.

Click to expand...

I was all ready to jump on the asus PX13, but I am deciding to wait until some new arm based stuff hits. Have a look at the Ampere desktop machines. They are absolute beasts. I think the issue with the X elite chips right now is compatibility of software. Once that goes away, they are going to be serious contenders.

bastibe said:

At the moment, it seems that AMD built the best laptop chip this year. Which is phenomenal, since the last few years arguably didn't have any very good laptop chips at all. And the Snapdragon chip still isn't bad at all, and the upcoming Intel chip will probably be reasonable as well.

However, the rumor mill has it, that next year, both AMD and Nvidia will release their own ARM-based laptop chips. If that's true, exciting times are ahead! Laptop CPUs going from a de-facto monopoly to an open market with four competing vendors can only be a good thing for us consumers.

Click to expand...

Sounds great

But I wonder how labour and cost intensive it is, to write native code for all of them. Snapdragon has the powerhouse Microsoft with windows and office and their own snapdragon based hardware behind them. AMD with their current hardware seems to be compatible anyway (don't know about the NPU).

But AMD and Nvidia ARM?

Just wondering. I am mainly interested in creative software, C1, Adobe PS/LR, DXO, On1, Topaz Photo AI and davinci resolve and MS Office.

Pixel8888 said:

bastibe said:

At the moment, it seems that AMD built the best laptop chip this year. Which is phenomenal, since the last few years arguably didn't have any very good laptop chips at all. And the Snapdragon chip still isn't bad at all, and the upcoming Intel chip will probably be reasonable as well.

However, the rumor mill has it, that next year, both AMD and Nvidia will release their own ARM-based laptop chips. If that's true, exciting times are ahead! Laptop CPUs going from a de-facto monopoly to an open market with four competing vendors can only be a good thing for us consumers.

Click to expand...

Sounds great

But I wonder how labour and cost intensive it is, to write native code for all of them. Snapdragon has the powerhouse Microsoft with windows and office and their own snapdragon based hardware behind them. AMD with their current hardware seems to be compatible anyway (don't know about the NPU).

But AMD and Nvidia ARM?

Just wondering. I am mainly interested in creative software, C1, Adobe PS/LR, DXO, On1, Topaz Photo AI and davinci resolve and MS Office.

Click to expand...

They don't have a choice. They have to write the code for the ARM chips or get left behind. That being said, they can take the basic code for M series and make the necessary changes for windows ARM. The processes are similar as far as what I have read about it.

Pixel8888 said:

bastibe said:

At the moment, it seems that AMD built the best laptop chip this year. Which is phenomenal, since the last few years arguably didn't have any very good laptop chips at all. And the Snapdragon chip still isn't bad at all, and the upcoming Intel chip will probably be reasonable as well.

However, the rumor mill has it, that next year, both AMD and Nvidia will release their own ARM-based laptop chips. If that's true, exciting times are ahead! Laptop CPUs going from a de-facto monopoly to an open market with four competing vendors can only be a good thing for us consumers.

Click to expand...

Sounds great

But I wonder how labour and cost intensive it is, to write native code for all of them. Snapdragon has the powerhouse Microsoft with windows and office and their own snapdragon based hardware behind them. AMD with their current hardware seems to be compatible anyway (don't know about the NPU).

But AMD and Nvidia ARM?

Just wondering. I am mainly interested in creative software, C1, Adobe PS/LR, DXO, On1, Topaz Photo AI and davinci resolve and MS Office.

Click to expand...

It'll all compile against the same ARM (aarch64) compile target as for the Snapdragon CPU. There will be no difference between the various ARM processors; just like there are no differences between the various x64 processors from Intel and AMD.

Meanwhile, Microsoft will continue honing their Prism compatibility layer for running x64 binaries on ARM.

Most programs will need no code changes beyond a recompile. Only some explicit SIMD code paths might need rewriting in the ARM intrinsics. But this is mostly covered automatically by the underlying OpenCL and platform libraries.

I would expect most big software vendors to ship ARM binaries within the year, if Microsoft keeps up their commitment to the platform.

Pixel8888 said:

bastibe said:

However, the rumor mill has it, that next year, both AMD and Nvidia will release their own ARM-based laptop chips.

Click to expand...

But AMD and Nvidia ARM?

Click to expand...

I have to agree with that sentiment. At least where AMD is concerned.

My understanding is that Intel licenses the x86-64 architecture from AMD or prehaps it's something more analgous to licensing the instruction set for the 64-bit architecture. Regardless, this has to be a non-trivial source of income for AMD.

I just cannot imagine AMD moving any portion of their own CPU product stack away from the basic architecture that generates this revenue. It would basically let Intel say “Why should we pay you if you're not even using x86-64 yourself? If we have to pay huge licensing fees, we may as well pay someone (ARM) who doesn't have product offerrings that are direct competitors to us.”

Billiam29 said:

Pixel8888 said:

bastibe said:

However, the rumor mill has it, that next year, both AMD and Nvidia will release their own ARM-based laptop chips.

Click to expand...

But AMD and Nvidia ARM?

Click to expand...

I have to agree with that sentiment. At least where AMD is concerned.

My understanding is that Intel licenses the x86-64 architecture from AMD or prehaps it's something more analgous to licensing the instruction set for the 64-bit architecture. Regardless, this has to be a non-trivial source of income for AMD.

I just cannot imagine AMD moving any portion of their own CPU product stack away from the basic architecture that generates this revenue. It would basically let Intel say “Why should we pay you if you're not even using x86-64 yourself? If we have to pay huge licensing fees, we may as well pay someone (ARM) who doesn't have product offerrings that are direct competitors to us.”

Click to expand...

They may see it as a bid to break into the smartphone arena, who knows.

But it's more than speculation, AMD have already announced that they're working on a "Versal AI Edge" chip that includes ARM CPU cores.

bastibe said:

At the moment, it seems that AMD built the best laptop chip this year. Which is phenomenal, since the last few years arguably didn't have any very good laptop chips at all.

Click to expand...

IMO, the 4nm Ryzen 7 7840U + 780M GPU + Ryzen AI NPU from 2023 is quite a good laptop chip. Fast with low power usage.

For unrelated reasons, I was recently compiling the raw processor Darktable for various platforms. Just for fun, I tried compiling it for ARM64 on my Surface Pro 11.

Compilation on ARM64 was significantly faster than using the X86_64 compiler on the Surface, which makes sense, what with it not being emulated. In either case, though, the Surface was shockingly usable for development tasks. Compilation times were very reasonable (a minute or so for a full rebuild), compared to the entirely unreasonably slow Surface 7 Pro I had before.

But what I really wanted to test was Darktable's image editing performance. Now, don't expect particular rigor here, I just did this for fun. I compiled Darktable for X64 and ARM64, and opened the same raw file in both, then applied the same editing operation in each, and used the built-in performance logging to benchmark how long it took to update the image after a slider had been moved. (This benchmark is dependent on the image in question, the screen resolution, the applied edits, and probably the moon phase. So the numbers themselves don't mean too much in comparison to other computers. But they are meaningful for comparing different configurations on the same computer.)

X64: 0.35s
ARM64: 0.15s

That's a nice speedup! More than a factor of two, just for switching out a few compiler flags. Not too shabby!

Then I noticed that in both cases, OpenCL had been deactivated. After some fumbling with the settings, I got Darktable to pick up the Snapdragon's OpenCL library. With that, the timings changes somewhat:

X64: 0.27s
ARM64: 0.15s

That's actually quite usable performance out of this little tablet, in both cases. And then it crashed on me, because the Snapdragon OpenCL library is a fickle thing, so I disabled OpenCL again. Thankfully (?), not the biggest loss, as it doesn't seem to help on ARM64 anyway.

TL;DR: Natively compiled ARM64 code is indeed more than twice as fast as emulated X64 code.

bastibe said:

However, the rumor mill has it, that next year, both AMD and Nvidia will release their own ARM-based laptop chips. If that's true, exciting times are ahead!

Click to expand...

NVidia has a long history of ARM processor (Tegra series). If I remember correctly, one of Microsoft Zune mp3/HD player used 1 of that variant in the past. The more recent one I remember is the Tegra X2.

If NVidia would make one for ARM windows, I'm very confident it's going to be solid, given their track records in hardware and drivers support. Plus the current Ai king! Imagine those CUDA cores, ray tracing, scaling and Ai power in a iGPU from NVidia, they can easily reign champion in the ARM race. Hahahahaha

Thanks for doing this test.

It would be better if you can also do this test again on a more recent hardware on the x64 part, like on a AMD 8840HS or a Intel 155H laptop, to see how big a gap there is. Your SP7 (i7 1065g7 ?) is showing it's age HAHAHAHA.

silentstorm said:

Thanks for doing this test.

It would be better if you can also do this test again on a more recent hardware on the x64 part, like on a AMD 8840HS or a Intel 155H laptop, to see how big a gap there is. Your SP7 (i7 1065g7 ?) is showing it's age HAHAHAHA.

Click to expand...

I don't have any comparable hardware available .

I guess, if you're interested, I could run a similar comparison against my work laptop and maybe my wife's M2 laptop, and whatever else I find lieing around. Might be a fun little distraction.

Well, well, well. I couldn't stop myself, and did in fact test darktable performance across multiple computers. The results are surprising for our little Snapdragon, to say the least.

Once again, I'm comparing darktable performance. This time, all the computers were connected to the same 4K displays, editing the same photo in the same way, performance being measured by darktable's performance logging feature.

Darktable can run in CPU mode or GPU mode. On the snapdragon, currently only CPU mode is available. On the Snapdragon, I compiled darktable for ARM.

Machines I have available:

• Surface Pro 11 with Snapdragon Plus
• Mac Studio with M2 Max
• Work Laptop with i7-12700H and NVidia T1200
• Gaming Desktop with i5-10400 and NVidia GTX 3060

Performance was tested in two modes, one simple render at screen resolution (as it would happen during editing), and one more complex render at export resolution. These are the first and second number, respectively, each given in seconds. Each measurement was repeated multiple times and averaged.

• 0.16s/1.6s for Snapdragon CPU
• 0.13s/1.3s for M2 CPU
• 0.08s/0.31s for M2 GPU
• 0.22s/2s for i7-12700H CPU
• 0.35s/0.88s for NVidia T1200 GPU
• 0.3s/3.1s for i5-10400 CPU
• 0.2s/0.75s for NVidia RTX 3060 GPU

So, of all my computers, the Snapdragon CPU is faster, for editing, than all but the M2 Max. That is an arrestingly positive result. Only for exports can the GPUs pull ahead.

All of these computers were rather significantly more expensive than the Surface tablet. All of them are much bigger devices. The fact that a tablet can compete with these other computers is very surprising to me.

bastibe said:

Well, well, well. I couldn't stop myself, and did in fact test darktable performance across multiple computers. The results are surprising for our little Snapdragon, to say the least.

Once again, I'm comparing darktable performance. This time, all the computers were connected to the same 4K displays, editing the same photo in the same way, performance being measured by darktable's performance logging feature.

Darktable can run in CPU mode or GPU mode. On the snapdragon, currently only CPU mode is available. On the Snapdragon, I compiled darktable for ARM.

Machines I have available:

• Surface Pro 11 with Snapdragon Plus
• Mac Studio with M2 Max
• Work Laptop with i7-12700H and NVidia T1200
• Gaming Desktop with i5-10400 and NVidia GTX 3060

Performance was tested in two modes, one simple render at screen resolution (as it would happen during editing), and one more complex render at export resolution. These are the first and second number, respectively, each given in seconds. Each measurement was repeated multiple times and averaged.

• 0.16s/1.6s for Snapdragon CPU
• 0.13s/1.3s for M2 CPU
• 0.08s/0.31s for M2 GPU
• 0.22s/2s for i7-12700H CPU
• 0.35s/0.88s for NVidia T1200 GPU
• 0.3s/3.1s for i5-10400 CPU
• 0.2s/0.75s for NVidia RTX 3060 GPU

So, of all my computers, the Snapdragon CPU is faster, for editing, than all but the M2 Max. That is an arrestingly positive result. Only for exports can the GPUs pull ahead.

All of these computers were rather significantly more expensive than the Surface tablet. All of them are much bigger devices. The fact that a tablet can compete with these other computers is very surprising to me.

Click to expand...

Very interesting test indeed. Thank you for taking time to do this. We now have a good idea how Elite X will be in the coming months. Hopefully MS continues with their full support to make ARM windows as good as x86 version.

Now I also wish apple to run their macOS on their ipads, that would be a whole lot AWESOME! Hahahahaha

silentstorm said:

Now I also wish apple to run their macOS on their ipads, that would be a whole lot AWESOME! Hahahahaha

Click to expand...

I bought the original iPad the day it came out. Owned several models over the years. But the app ecosystem never really made sense to me on such a large device. It's big enough to multi-task, so why didn't it let me multi-task? It's big enough to use accessories, so why didn't it let me connect accessories? I took it on our honeymoon, to back up our photos. You had to download the photos onto the iPad using one app, then upload them to dropbox using another app. Each time you had to select each photo one by one. It was so slow, so cumbersome. A real computer, this was not. This was many years ago.

Since then, I wanted a tablet with a real operating system. So when Microsoft released their Surface tablet, I bought one. The early ones were slow, and Windows 8 was barely usable with the touch screen. I had two off-brand Windows tablets, too. The Surface Pro 7 was the first one I found actually good enough. Juuust fast enough to play YouTube and Netflix reliably. Windows at that time had evolved far enough to be usable with just the touch screen.

When comparing my experiences with an iPad-toting colleague, I had access to a real browser with a real adblocker. A real file system, with full support for e.g. USB sticks. The ability to run real software in a pinch, not just scaled-up phone apps. And yet, the hardware was slow and clunky, compared to what Apple put into their iPads. All this time, I would have bought a MacOS-iPad in a heartbeat! They had all the good cards in their hands, and just chose not to play them!

Meanwhile, Microsoft iterated on their Surface products and their Windows touch experience. It took them many years, but the current Surface Pro 11 is actually competitive with the iPad, at long last. Whatever window of opportunity Apple had to ship a MacOS iPad, they missed it.

bastibe said:

silentstorm said:

Now I also wish apple to run their macOS on their ipads, that would be a whole lot AWESOME! Hahahahaha

Click to expand...

I bought the original iPad the day it came out. Owned several models over the years. But the app ecosystem never really made sense to me on such a large device. It's big enough to multi-task, so why didn't it let me multi-task? It's big enough to use accessories, so why didn't it let me connect accessories? I took it on our honeymoon, to back up our photos. You had to download the photos onto the iPad using one app, then upload them to dropbox using another app. Each time you had to select each photo one by one. It was so slow, so cumbersome. A real computer, this was not. This was many years ago.

Since then, I wanted a tablet with a real operating system. So when Microsoft released their Surface tablet, I bought one. The early ones were slow, and Windows 8 was barely usable with the touch screen. I had two off-brand Windows tablets, too. The Surface Pro 7 was the first one I found actually good enough. Juuust fast enough to play YouTube and Netflix reliably. Windows at that time had evolved far enough to be usable with just the touch screen.

When comparing my experiences with an iPad-toting colleague, I had access to a real browser with a real adblocker. A real file system, with full support for e.g. USB sticks. The ability to run real software in a pinch, not just scaled-up phone apps. And yet, the hardware was slow and clunky, compared to what Apple put into their iPads. All this time, I would have bought a MacOS-iPad in a heartbeat! They had all the good cards in their hands, and just chose not to play them!

Meanwhile, Microsoft iterated on their Surface products and their Windows touch experience. It took them many years, but the current Surface Pro 11 is actually competitive with the iPad, at long last. Whatever window of opportunity Apple had to ship a MacOS iPad, they missed it.

Click to expand...

Agreed. I am just waiting a few months until I can get some sales on the new surface pro, then my ipad is outta here. Full OS on my tablet will be killer again. I had the surface 3 (non pro) with dock etc and I loved it. I will be getting 2 of these snapdragon models for my wife and I.

The Point and Shoot Pro said:

bastibe said:

... Microsoft iterated on their Surface products and their Windows touch experience. It took them many years, but the current Surface Pro 11 is actually competitive with the iPad, at long last. Whatever window of opportunity Apple had to ship a MacOS iPad, they missed it.

Click to expand...

Click to expand...

Yeah, some people demand a touchscreen but some owners hardly ever use it.

The Point and Shoot Pro said:

Agreed. I am just waiting a few months until I can get some sales on the new surface pro, then my ipad is outta here. Full OS on my tablet will be killer again. I had the surface 3 (non pro) with dock etc and I loved it. I will be getting 2 of these snapdragon models for my wife and I.

Click to expand...

You certainly buy (or threaten to buy) more computer equipment than we do!

Today I visited Best Buy to look at Snapdragon laptops. For me, Surface Pro 11 is a non-starter because it requires $190 add-on keyboard, which feels flimsy and not good for typing.

Surface laptop is about the same price and includes a fairly nice keyboard. Not only that, it's available with a larger 15" screen for about $200 more. Surface Studio costs more.

Dell, HP, and Lenovo also were showing Snapdragon laptops or convertibles. HP Omnibook is the cutest and only $899, but cute is not a good reason to purchase.

Lots of Copilot+ and AI branding, but it's unclear what the advantages are if any.

CAcreeks said:

Surface laptop is about the same price and includes a fairly nice keyboard. Not only that, it's available with a larger 15" screen for about $200 more. Surface Studio costs more.

Click to expand...

If I'd bought a Snapdragon laptop as I'd originally intended, the Surface Laptop 15" was the one I liked best.

CAcreeks said:

Lots of Copilot+ and AI branding, but it's unclear what the advantages are if any.

Click to expand...

I'm still waiting for a satisfactory answer to that question.

Austinian said:

CAcreeks said:

Surface laptop is about the same price and includes a fairly nice keyboard. Not only that, it's available with a larger 15" screen for about $200 more. Surface Studio costs more.

Click to expand...

If I'd bought a Snapdragon laptop as I'd originally intended, the Surface Laptop 15" was the one I liked best.

Austinian said:

Lots of Copilot+ and AI branding, but it's unclear what the advantages are if any.

Click to expand...

I'm still waiting for a satisfactory answer to that question.

Click to expand...

It's all about the neural processing and the TOPS...

Robert Zanatta said:

Austinian said:

Robert Zanatta said:

Lots of Copilot+ and AI branding, but it's unclear what the advantages are if any.

Click to expand...

I'm still waiting for a satisfactory answer to that question.

Click to expand...

It's all about the neural processing and the TOPS...

Click to expand...

I call BS on all that AI processing stuff. As far as I can tell, somebody got their marketing message mixed up early on, and now the entire industry is stuck with a misleading measure:

These TPUs or NPUs or whatever you want to call them, were originally introduced in phones as a power-saving measure. Their TOPs are 8-bit integer processing operations per second. GPUs don't typically report that, as it's not interesting for games. But they report FLOPs instead, which is 32-bit floating point operations per second. They can typically swap out each 32-bit float for four 8-bit integers. As such, a measly Nvidia 3060 can easily reach those 50 TOPs required for the Copilot+ branding. Thus the TOPs themselves are not impressive. What is impressive, is that a TPU can do 50 TOPs on a smartphone power budget!

Thus these NPUs enable, for instance, transcribing audio continuously in the background, or recognizing text in a continuous stream of screenshots. These were never before feasible without burning your battery.

But the marketing instead focuses on LLMs, which they call "AI". The NPUs, however, are not practical for LLMs. LLMs are limited by memory, not compute. At least at the moment, a good LLM for conversation or image generation is hundreds of gigabytes in size. Woefully too big for any mobile device, NPU notwithstanding. Microsoft is shipping a few "small" SLMs with their Copilot hardware, but they are so underwhelming as to be useless in practice.

Thus, for the time being, NPUs are a power-saving measure for running small machine learning tasks continuously in the background. "AI" things are computed in the cloud.

CAcreeks said:

The Point and Shoot Pro said:

bastibe said:

... Microsoft iterated on their Surface products and their Windows touch experience. It took them many years, but the current Surface Pro 11 is actually competitive with the iPad, at long last. Whatever window of opportunity Apple had to ship a MacOS iPad, they missed it.

Click to expand...

Click to expand...

Yeah, some people demand a touchscreen but some owners hardly ever use it.

CAcreeks said:

Agreed. I am just waiting a few months until I can get some sales on the new surface pro, then my ipad is outta here. Full OS on my tablet will be killer again. I had the surface 3 (non pro) with dock etc and I loved it. I will be getting 2 of these snapdragon models for my wife and I.

Click to expand...

You certainly buy (or threaten to buy) more computer equipment than we do!

Today I visited Best Buy to look at Snapdragon laptops. For me, Surface Pro 11 is a non-starter because it requires $190 add-on keyboard, which feels flimsy and not good for typing.

Surface laptop is about the same price and includes a fairly nice keyboard. Not only that, it's available with a larger 15" screen for about $200 more. Surface Studio costs more.

Dell, HP, and Lenovo also were showing Snapdragon laptops or convertibles. HP Omnibook is the cutest and only $899, but cute is not a good reason to purchase.

Lots of Copilot+ and AI branding, but it's unclear what the advantages are if any.

Click to expand...

Different tools for different jobs. I love my laptop for on the go work, etc. If I were to buy a new SD laptop today it would be the 15" inch surface laptop with 64gb of ram. I also want a device to take with me for reading magazines, watching videos and the scattered bit of work as well.

After owning a surface 3 previously the keyboard is just as good as my current iPad keyboard but the software on the ipad is crap compared to what I can get on windows. Now with the SD processor in the pro, I am very excited to have that chip in a tablet device.

I am not sure if I am going to go ARM on my new laptop when I get it, but I am sure as there is poop in a cat that I am getting that surface to replace my ipad. It's the last apple product I own, and it needs to go.