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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

#21

Post by nfriedly »

joecool1029 wrote: post #18
nfriedly wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Aah, ok, I edited my comment to just say that it was the best for a while, not still the best. Agree with you about Samsung's 5nm process.

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

#22

Post by rbanffy »

GuB-42 wrote: post #17
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.

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).

I am sure that if the RPi Foundation can do it, Qualcomm can as well.

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

#23

Post by _ea1k »

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.

That's a good point. Perhaps even something like the NUC form-factor would work well.

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

#24

Post by jsheard »

rbanffy wrote: post #22
GuB-42 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I am sure that if the RPi Foundation can do it, Qualcomm can as well.

Broadcom is the counterpart to Qualcomm in that comparison, and those two have similar attitudes towards the hobbyist/enthusiast market - they don't care in the slightest. It took a entity outside of Broadcom which nonetheless had deep connections to them (Eben Upton was there prior to starting RPi) in order to broker a compromise where the Pi could happen, and even then Broadcom kept most of the documentation tied up in NDAs and the bare SOCs not available for sale to the general public.

The Raspberry Pi is an anomaly that's unlikely to be replicated.

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

#26

Post by clamchowder »

nfriedly wrote: post #12
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.

The 8+ runs at slightly faster clocks and has a smaller die. Somehow TSMC's 4 nm is better than Samsung's 4 nm.

But yeah everything I wrote there should be applicable to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 as well, just without the 10% GPU clock speed increase that Qualcomm says the 8+ gets.

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

#28

Post by bpye »

charcircuit wrote: post #27
cubefox wrote: post #25

Any explanation why Qualcomm uses "tile based rendering" while Nvidia and AMD don't?

Both Nvidia and AMD do use tile based rendering

And for what it’s worth Apple and Imagination do also - Imagination being where tiled rendering really started.

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

#29

Post by kllrnohj »

charcircuit wrote: post #27
cubefox wrote: post #25

Any explanation why Qualcomm uses "tile based rendering" while Nvidia and AMD don't?

Both Nvidia and AMD do use tile based rendering

Not quite, not in the same way mobile GPUs do. Also I don't think AMD ever did the transition. They announced it (draw stream binning), but don't seem to have ever shipped it?

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

#30

Post by kllrnohj »

cubefox wrote: post #25

Any explanation why Qualcomm uses "tile based rendering" while Nvidia and AMD don't?

It's significantly more bandwidth efficient to do tile based rendering however it has more performance cliffs and requires more game developer care to avoid hitting issues. For mobile SoCs (powervr, adreno, mali, and whatever apple calls their powervr-derivative) you can't just throw GDDR and get gobs of bandwidth, and also bandwidth is power expensive, so the savings more than offsets the performance cliffs and developer complications
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