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Snapdragon 8 Gen 1's iGPU: Adreno Gets Big

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Re: Snapdragon 8 Gen 1's iGPU: Adreno Gets Big

#11

Post by jsheard »

RuggedPineapple wrote: post #9
rbanffy wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe their biggest failure in branding is to not put out Raspberry Pi-like small boards for people to experiment. Anyone with a slight interest in computers knows an M3 is a beast and that an i3 is meh. Almost nobody outside Qualcomm knows why a Gen 8 N is better than an 800 and what the difference would be.

They do in fact put those out. That said the pricing is not at all Pi like. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 board goes for north of a thousand dollars. https://www.lantronix.com/products/snapdragon-8-gen-2-mobile...

That's only Pi-like in the sense of being an SBC, unlike the Pi it's meant to be an evaluation/reference platform for integrators who want to build their own board around the SOC, not something you would buy to use for its own sake.

Re: Snapdragon 8 Gen 1's iGPU: Adreno Gets Big

#12

Post by nfriedly »

School-Cotton wrote: post #10

The title should say 8+, not 8 (@dang)

You're correct. But I believe they have an identical design - the only difference is that the 8+ runs a little faster and more efficiently, because it was manufactured by TSMC, whereas the 8 was manufactured by Samsung.

Re: Snapdragon 8 Gen 1's iGPU: Adreno Gets Big

#13

Post by rbanffy »

jsheard wrote: post #11
RuggedPineapple wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do in fact put those out. That said the pricing is not at all Pi like. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 board goes for north of a thousand dollars. https://www.lantronix.com/products/snapdragon-8-gen-2-mobile...

That's only Pi-like in the sense of being an SBC, unlike the Pi it's meant to be an evaluation/reference platform for integrators who want to build their own board around the SOC, not something you would buy to use for its own sake.

And this is where they fail - the people who gets their boards have almost zero interest in upstreaming whatever hardware enablement they do to make the boards sort of work for their specific use cases.

I really don't think undercutting their evaluation board business with affordable SBCs would hurt their bottom line.

Re: Snapdragon 8 Gen 1's iGPU: Adreno Gets Big

#14

Post by rbanffy »

bartekpacia wrote: post #7
rayiner wrote: post #3

Snapdragon 800 -> Snapdragon 8 Gen N is terrible marketing. It makes everything sound like a point release.

I remember having Snapdragon 800 in my LG G2. It was a beast at the time!

Most people switch phones on a cadence that makes every new one feel like a beast (my personal phone is a 2nd gen iPhone SE and my new work phone is a 13, which feels like a beast next to the other).

It's also incredibly rare to find someone who knows what chip is in their phones. I have the vague notion my personal phone has an A15 or something like that.

Re: Snapdragon 8 Gen 1's iGPU: Adreno Gets Big

#15

Post by nfriedly »

causi wrote: post #5
rayiner wrote: post #3

Snapdragon 800 -> Snapdragon 8 Gen N is terrible marketing. It makes everything sound like a point release.

My headcanon is that Snapdragon 875 would've been a great chip unlike the infamously overheating 888.

I'm on a Snapdragon 870 (moto g100), and it's great. Performance and battery life are both good enough that I don't think about it very often, and I've never had any overheating issues.

I think the 870 was the highest end Snapdragon that didn't have any overheating issues for a while.

Re: Snapdragon 8 Gen 1's iGPU: Adreno Gets Big

#16

Post by jsheard »

rbanffy wrote: post #13
jsheard wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's only Pi-like in the sense of being an SBC, unlike the Pi it's meant to be an evaluation/reference platform for integrators who want to build their own board around the SOC, not something you would buy to use for its own sake.

And this is where they fail - the people who gets their boards have almost zero interest in upstreaming whatever hardware enablement they do to make the boards sort of work for their specific use cases. I really don't think undercutting their evaluation board business with affordable SBCs would hurt their bottom line.

The people who buy those eval boards probably aren't even allowed to upstream whatever they do with it, they'll have signed an NDA with Qualcomm to get access to the documentation.

Re: Snapdragon 8 Gen 1's iGPU: Adreno Gets Big

#17

Post by GuB-42 »

jsheard wrote: post #11
RuggedPineapple wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do in fact put those out. That said the pricing is not at all Pi like. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 board goes for north of a thousand dollars. https://www.lantronix.com/products/snapdragon-8-gen-2-mobile...

That's only Pi-like in the sense of being an SBC, unlike the Pi it's meant to be an evaluation/reference platform for integrators who want to build their own board around the SOC, not something you would buy to use for its own sake.

But maybe they could make it more Pi-like, that is pricing it so that it can interest both integrators and hobbyists, with a bootloader that makes it easy to tinker with the OS (not necessarily the firmware).

Re: Snapdragon 8 Gen 1's iGPU: Adreno Gets Big

#18

Post by joecool1029 »

nfriedly wrote: post #15
causi wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My headcanon is that Snapdragon 875 would've been a great chip unlike the infamously overheating 888.

I'm on a Snapdragon 870 (moto g100), and it's great. Performance and battery life are both good enough that I don't think about it very often, and I've never had any overheating issues. I think the 870 was the highest end Snapdragon that didn't have any overheating issues for a while.

5nm Samsung process was just bad. Needs active cooling.

I've had the sm8250 (865 in my case) and it's a great chip that's faster in real-world conditions than the 888 hand warmer was. Now I have an 8 gen 2 device and it has no overheating issues. The 8 gen 1+ doesn't appear to have any either. I avoided the 8 gen 1 after having the bad experience with the 888.

Re: Snapdragon 8 Gen 1's iGPU: Adreno Gets Big

#19

Post by monocasa »

xlazom00 wrote: post #2

Does anyone know if there is any processor(in phone) with SVE/SVE2? As SVE/SVE2 SHOULD be in all new ARMv9.0-A + CPU cores. I did have a chance to test only Qualcomm Snapdragon cores ( Samsung Galaxy S23).

Looking at the docs, it doesn't look like ARMv9-A strictly requires FEAT_SVE to be implemented.

What that means in practice is anyone's guess.

Re: Snapdragon 8 Gen 1's iGPU: Adreno Gets Big

#20

Post by monocasa »

rbanffy wrote: post #6
rayiner wrote: post #3

Snapdragon 800 -> Snapdragon 8 Gen N is terrible marketing. It makes everything sound like a point release.

I believe their biggest failure in branding is to not put out Raspberry Pi-like small boards for people to experiment. Anyone with a slight interest in computers knows an M3 is a beast and that an i3 is meh. Almost nobody outside Qualcomm knows why a Gen 8 N is better than an 800 and what the difference would be.

There's economic reasons behind the cheap SoCs you see. Invariably it's when an SoC was made in bulk expecting some market that never materialized.

For instance the original Pi SoC was very clearly intended for some set top box OEM that didn't pick it up for some reason.

When that happens, after a while the chip manufacturer is willing to sell them for way below cost just to get anything back from their inventory that from their perspective looks like a complete loss.

So you get an industrious cottage industry that takes those to cheap to make sense chips, cost reduces the reference design, and ships them with the just barely building sdk from the chip manufacturer.

At the end of the day Qualcomm doesn't care about this market because they are pretty good about keeping their customers on the hook for their bulk orders. So they're focused on supporting current bulk customers where a $1k dev board is actually a really reasonable price.

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