What to expect from Adreno 225 & Krait

[french toast]

As you will know Qualcomm the SOC market leader (android) is releasing its new chips soon, with its Krait architecture being a significant improvement to its previous designs and even Cortex A9.
How ever their Adreno graphics have been a let down, when compared to mali,power vr and even nvidia has faster chip with tegra 3.

So my question (s) is this, will the adreno, with its higher clocks and better drivers be enough to overtake apple a5 and tegra 3? and how would it fair to the next gen mali t604??

On a related note, how would the Krait architecture scrub up against cortex a-15, clock for clock?? st errickson have claimed that it can optimise the a-15 to 4 dmips per mhz..is that possible??

 

[french toast]

..Well my first thread has gone down well......

 

[Lazy8s]

It's a good solution coming at a great time, so it'll continue Qualcomm's high marketshare.

The A15 SoCs with Rogue and T-604 will outperform it by quite a lot. They're also coming out quite a bit later, so Qualcomm's next parts after that will really be the SoCs to watch.

 

[roninja]

Longer term question remains do Qualcomm develop in house or license third party graphics ip?

 

[french toast]

future

It's a good solution coming at a great time, so it'll continue Qualcomm's high marketshare.

The A15 SoCs with Rogue and T-604 will outperform it by quite a lot. They're also coming out quite a bit later, so Qualcomm's next parts after that will really be the SoCs to watch.

Yea it does look that way doesnt it, speaking of which i think the adreno 3xx series does have some potential, as the 220 had a lot of computer power unused...whether that was bandwidth, drivers, or shader inefficiency.

I personally cant wait for exynos 4412... although there is also the 5250- but duel core a-15...i prefer the 4 threads over ipc my self.

St erickson will blow everyone out the water in 2013....

 

[3dcgi]

Longer term question remains do Qualcomm develop in house or license third party graphics ip?

They've been aggressively recruiting engineers for a while now so their plan is to develop in house.

 

[Ailuros]

They've been aggressively recruiting engineers for a while now so their plan is to develop in house.

IHVs are actively recruiting engineers all the time; even IMG is planning according to their CEO to increase their personell by 300 folks.

You might be most likely correct with your assumption, but in any case is there any indication that they're hiring mostly hw or sw engineers? If there's one department IHVs hurt these days (IMG probably including) then it's windows driver development resources and that's exactly a critical department all involved parties MUST be ready for when win8 ships.

 

[3dcgi]

IHVs are actively recruiting engineers all the time; even IMG is planning according to their CEO to increase their personell by 300 folks.

You might be most likely correct with your assumption, but in any case is there any indication that they're hiring mostly hw or sw engineers? If there's one department IHVs hurt these days (IMG probably including) then it's windows driver development resources and that's exactly a critical department all involved parties MUST be ready for when win8 ships.

I'm not assuming anything in this case. You're correct that all IHVs are constantly looking for experienced engineers, but Qualcomm has been aggressively pursuing hardware and software engineers over the past year. I don't know what ratio of hardware/software engineers they've hired, but they're definitely trying to design their own hardware.

 

[dagamer]

I thought Qualcomm's mobile GPU unit was full of ATIs old mobile Imageon division (and likely related patebts) before they sold them in 2006?

 

[Lazy8s]

It is. They have some of the BitBoys, too.

That doesn't mean that more resources aren't necessary to keep up, though.

 

[Ailuros]

It is. They have some of the BitBoys, too.

That doesn't mean that more resources aren't necessary to keep up, though.

I'm not aware how big their graphics team is these days, but as with all things efficiency comes before quantity. You can have a handful of guys performing small wonders and in another case times more than that and for whatever reason deliver way less.

Qualcomm is a semiconductor manufacturer that has shown some impressive execution with its SoCs and when they claim they'll have something on time in the direction of DX10/11 I don't have much reason to doubt them.

My former point was more that sw is equally important as hw and I doubt most of the firms that deal with the small form factor markets have any serious segmentation (always in a relative sense) between hw and sw engineering. You can't have a hw engineer that doesn't have a clue about sw and vice versa. That said IMHO win8 driver experience is a very critical point and I'd expect most firms to concentrate mostly in that department. If there's one thing they should be scared of IHVs like NVIDIA then its driver development.

 

[french toast]

Yea i agree nvidia always provides decent drivers, indeed i remember Anand banging on about it when tegra 2 was first demoed.

You do have to wander how well adreno would do with the same software resources that nvidia has? this might give you a clue...
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1386197

If the Adreno 225 gets some of this love then i will be happy.

 

[3dcgi]

You can't have a hw engineer that doesn't have a clue about sw and vice versa.

For high level architects that's true, but most hw engineers don't know much about how drivers work.

 

[silent_guy]

For high level architects that's true, but most hw engineers don't know much about how drivers work.

SW engineers have it easy as it is: no fear of creating fatal bugs that doom silicon. We shouldn't make it even easier by making it convenient to map the hardware onto a driver!

 

[Ailuros]

SW engineers have it easy as it is: no fear of creating fatal bugs that doom silicon. We shouldn't make it even easier by making it convenient to map the hardware onto a driver!

It doesn't have to be a fatal bug per se; a dumb method to handle task X that eats up too many unnecessary resources is good enough. Then the notion "oh well with the next generation we'll have N cores more and therefore X% more performance" isn't solving the problem, it's just sluggish engineering. A crappy shader compiler could be just as or worse; we'll have with the next core iteration twice more ALU so who cares falls into the same ballpark.

 

[french toast]

UPDATE; For those who have not seen the tech websites an unknown device sporting the new Snapdragon MSM 8960 has shown up on a popular benchmark..NENAMARK 2 - The MSM 8960 - includes duel core Krait+ 1mb cache @1.5ghz and Adreno 225 @400 running through a proper duel channel memory controller and intergrated GPS & 3G/LTE baseband...all manufactured on TSMC's 28nm LP gate last process.

The scores are higher than a lot of people have expected..including me.





As you can see that is a very capable score, especially when compared to arguably 2011's best and most powerfull Android phone..the Samsung Galaxy S2, which pulled in an impressive 46.2fps.
It looks even more impressive when you consider that Nenamark 2 isn't 'off screen' so screen resolution does play a significant part.
The SGS2 runs at 800x480 (WVGA) whilst the Snapdragon device uses a much higher 1024x600 display.

Assuming the unknown Snapdragon device doesn't use a substandard pentile screen, that score is very impressive indeed.
(pentile RBGW draws 30% less pixels compared to RGB)

The Transformer Prime carrying the Tegra 3 scored a respectable 48.52 fps, again keeping in mind the higher resolution of that tablet @ 1280x752.
http://nena.se/nenamark/view?version=2

Perhaps a somebody to draw some conclusions from the 2 scores/resolutions to see which is better?
Keeping in mind likely different Android OS and early drivers for the Snapdragon.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

Assuming the unknown Snapdragon device doesn't use a substandard pentile screen, that score is very impressive indeed.
(pentile RBGW draws 30% less pixels compared to RGB)

While older pentile screens have 30% less subpixels, this loss of information is only done on the panel itself, so the performance for that resolution is the same, either it's pentile or not.

The Transformer Prime carrying the Tegra 3 scored a respectable 48.52 fps, again keeping in mind the higher resolution of that tablet @ 1280x752.
http://nena.se/nenamark/view?version=2

Perhaps a somebody to draw some conclusions from the 2 scores/resolutions to see which is better?
Keeping in mind likely different Android OS and early drivers for the Snapdragon.

The Adreno family seems to be leading that benchmark anyways, with Adreno 220 beating the Mali 400 MP4 in SGS II.
Nonetheless, the HP Touchpad (flashed with Android) renders at 1024*768, and hits some 43 FPS.
That said, the Adreno 225 seems to be about 25% faster than Adreno 220, at least in that benchmark.

However, 54.5 FPS is close to 60, so these scores could be bottlenecked by vsync.

 

[french toast]

Oh right, that clears the pentile thing up then.
Yea the only truly noteworthy graphics benchmark is GL benchmark, lets see if an unknown Egypt 720p off screen turns up next!

The new Adreno drivers pulls anywhere up to 50% better performance than before, i think Samsung got access to them & implemented them first, so with new drivers, much higher clockspeed and increased bandwidth we should see a nice improvement.:smile:

EDIT; That bodes well for the next gen 3xx series doesn't it? looks like a Adreno 320 might be a capable device.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

Well, Anand says that (Qualcomm says that) Adreno 225 is 8x Adreno 200, and Adreno 320 is 15x Adreno 200. That makes Adreno 320 a bit below 2x Adreno 225.

However, I'm not really sure we'll see Adreno 320 in devices during 2012..

 

[french toast]

Well, Anand says that (Qualcomm says that) Adreno 225 is 8x Adreno 200, and Adreno 320 is 15x Adreno 200. That makes Adreno 320 a bit below 2x Adreno 225.

However, I'm not really sure we'll see Adreno 320 in devices during 2012..

Mmm, That seems abit low considering it is suposed to be a brand new architecture, and also a 'quad core?' (which lets face it could mean any one of a number of things these days..i will take it as full gpu cores, most likely 4x305 or something.)

You would assume they would be able to multiply the ALUs up cheaply and get much higher marketing numbers, i mean a quad core new architecture, is only 90% faster than its old generation single core??

Saying that though, Qualcomm have usually given accurate gpu perormance numbers, when they say 2x it usually translates to exactly 2x real gaming performance, where as Nvidia or Samsung quote stuff like 5x and ends up being closer to 2x.