4 ms·

Maybe Google should start designing it's own CPUs/SoCs as well, since Qualcomm doesn't really seem capable of keeping up with what Apple is doing. Snapdragon 83

by jrs95 9y ago

Maybe Google should start designing it's own CPUs/SoCs as well, since Qualcomm doesn't really seem capable of keeping up with what Apple is doing. Snapdragon 835 came out 6 months after the A10, and scored about 2/3 as well at single core, and less than 10% on Geekbench 4. A11 scored twice what the 835 did on single core, and over 50% more on multi core, and the 835 is going to be the best chip available in the U.S. for Android until sometime next year. Plus, you've got Samsung getting exclusive launch deals for the newest Snapdragon chips now, so other manufacturers are just now launching their flagship devices with hardware that is increasingly far behind what Apple is putting out. This gap could end up being as bad as Intel and AMD pre-Ryzen if something isn't done about it. Imagine what the high end laptop market would have looked like if only Macs had Intel chips!

MBCook 9y ago
I don’t think google has enough volume to make that worthwhile. Wouldn’t you need to sell tens of millions of chips for that to pay off?
- jrs95 9y ago
  If they only used it in their own devices, it would probably be too expensive. If they sold those devices to other manufacturers, they could probably get enough volume to at least avoid taking big losses. It's less about making money from selling the chips, and more about keeping the hardware behind the Android ecosystem competitive.
  - MBCook 9y ago
    I wonder if the other OEMs would buy it. I could see Samsung wanting to make their own or at least not strengthen their dependence on Google.
simonh 9y ago
The problem is there is no magic wand the Android SOC manufacturers can wave to match Apple on chip performance. It's a multi-front war. Firstly yes Apple is well ahead in CPU core design and has been since 2013 when they brought out the first 64-bit ARM chip. And yes I know 64 bit by itself doesn't account for the performance increase, but the 64-bit ARM core architecture is much more streamlined and efficient than 32-bit which had accumulated all sorts of cruft over the years. The A7 wasn't just 64-bit, it was step change up in performance creating a gap that the other ARM vendors have never caught up with. That's not the whole story though, core design alone isn't the only reason Apple chips are faster, another is they have dramatically more cache memory on chip that other designs. The A10 had a total of 7MB of L2 and L3 cache, more than double the maximum configuration for the 835. Apple SOCs are massive, which makes them expensive. Finally, they can build in customised capabilities in hardware to support specific high level features, such as the secure enclave and the neural engine in A11 Bionic to support image post-processing effects and face recognition. This is clearly what Google is trying to do, but in an add-on chip because they're not (yet?) up to designing their own SOC. So it's not just the the Apple SOCs are faster, the reasons why they are faster are on several different axes. Some SOC vendors apparently say their profit margin lies in shaving off just one or two square millimetres of die size. Market forces like that would never produce a chip like the A11. So really this approach by Google of designing their own custom co-processor, and maybe eventually their own SOCs, could be the only way to close this gap.
awalton 9y ago
The problem is that basically Qualcomm is strangling the entire cellphone space. So what if you built a completely new, much faster, much better-in-every-way SoC... if you still have to pay Qualcomm for the entire chipset because they refuse to sell you just the modem without you paying the full bill. Multiple designers could run circles around Qualcomm, but the marginal cost of doing so combined with the number of CPUs you'd have to mint to do so makes it a losing proposition. Apple's in the unique position of being able to leverage Intel to bend Qualcomm over a barrel, and Qualcomm fires back with a gazillion lawsuits and New York Times articles that cry "woe is me, Apple is eating my lunch!" On a different topic, benchmark navalgazing is probably not going to help anyone. Every company that's been designing CPUs from the mid 80s on has been writing benchmark defeating code, and I'm 100% certain PA SEMI/Apple is no different; they certainly have the silicon space to waste writing Application-specific-accelerators for acing benchmarking tasks, especially on a platform with as much opacity as Apple holds over the iPhone.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > The problem is that basically Qualcomm is strangling the entire cellphone space. So what if you built a completely new, much faster, much better-in-every-way SoC... if you still have to pay Qualcomm for the entire chipset because they refuse to sell you just the modem without you paying the full bill. If Qualcomm is that big of a drag on Android (or not-Apple, but it amounts to the same thing) smartphones, maybe the solution is for Google to buy them outright and rearrange their practices. Sure, it'd be expensive, but not anything Google couldn't afford.
bitmapbrother 9y ago
Why not also blame Samsung for their Exynos or Huawei for their Kirin? Do you know what all 3 of these 3 SoC's have in common? They all use the same reference design developed by ARM. None of these SoC makers are going to spend the additional billions in SoC R&D deviating from the ARM design. If you really want to see a change then it must begin with ARM. >Qualcomm doesn't really seem capable of keeping up with what Apple is doing. Snapdragon 835 came out 6 months after the A10, and scored about 2/3 as well at single core, and less than 10% on Geekbench 4. A11 scored twice what the 835 did on single core, and over 50% more on multi core, and the 835 is going to be the best chip available in the U.S. for Android until sometime next year. Qualcomm and Apple are on different release cycles. The SD 845 will be in the same ballpark in multicore score and about 25% slower in single core than the A11.
- jrs95 9y ago
  You could blame them as well, it's just a lot less relevant to the U.S. smartphone market (where iPhone has the highest market share AFAIK) since everyone is on Snapdragon here. As for Qualcomm and Apple being on different release cycles...that's exactly the problem! They're 6 months behind AND still have worse performance, plus due to their deal with Samsung, it's going to take even longer than that for any other manufacturers to ship devices with 845. As another comment said, it's not really going to be profitable for any company to try and compete with Apple on this. Which is why if it is going to happen, it's going to have to be done by someone like Google who has a vested interest in it beyond profitability from the chips themselves. If ARM reference designs can't keep up with what Apple is doing, and nobody else is willing to invest to go beyond them, Android will fall behind in the high end of the market.

by jrs95 9y ago

MBCook 9y ago

I don’t think google has enough volume to make that worthwhile. Wouldn’t you need to sell tens of millions of chips for that to pay off?

jrs95 9y ago
If they only used it in their own devices, it would probably be too expensive. If they sold those devices to other manufacturers, they could probably get enough volume to at least avoid taking big losses. It's less about making money from selling the chips, and more about keeping the hardware behind the Android ecosystem competitive.
- MBCook 9y ago
  I wonder if the other OEMs would buy it. I could see Samsung wanting to make their own or at least not strengthen their dependence on Google.

simonh 9y ago

The problem is there is no magic wand the Android SOC manufacturers can wave to match Apple on chip performance. It's a multi-front war. Firstly yes Apple is well ahead in CPU core design and has been since 2013 when they brought out the first 64-bit ARM chip. And yes I know 64 bit by itself doesn't account for the performance increase, but the 64-bit ARM core architecture is much more streamlined and efficient than 32-bit which had accumulated all sorts of cruft over the years. The A7 wasn't just 64-bit, it was step change up in performance creating a gap that the other ARM vendors have never caught up with. That's not the whole story though, core design alone isn't the only reason Apple chips are faster, another is they have dramatically more cache memory on chip that other designs. The A10 had a total of 7MB of L2 and L3 cache, more than double the maximum configuration for the 835. Apple SOCs are massive, which makes them expensive. Finally, they can build in customised capabilities in hardware to support specific high level features, such as the secure enclave and the neural engine in A11 Bionic to support image post-processing effects and face recognition. This is clearly what Google is trying to do, but in an add-on chip because they're not (yet?) up to designing their own SOC. So it's not just the the Apple SOCs are faster, the reasons why they are faster are on several different axes. Some SOC vendors apparently say their profit margin lies in shaving off just one or two square millimetres of die size. Market forces like that would never produce a chip like the A11. So really this approach by Google of designing their own custom co-processor, and maybe eventually their own SOCs, could be the only way to close this gap.

awalton 9y ago

The problem is that basically Qualcomm is strangling the entire cellphone space. So what if you built a completely new, much faster, much better-in-every-way SoC... if you still have to pay Qualcomm for the entire chipset because they refuse to sell you just the modem without you paying the full bill. Multiple designers could run circles around Qualcomm, but the marginal cost of doing so combined with the number of CPUs you'd have to mint to do so makes it a losing proposition. Apple's in the unique position of being able to leverage Intel to bend Qualcomm over a barrel, and Qualcomm fires back with a gazillion lawsuits and New York Times articles that cry "woe is me, Apple is eating my lunch!" On a different topic, benchmark navalgazing is probably not going to help anyone. Every company that's been designing CPUs from the mid 80s on has been writing benchmark defeating code, and I'm 100% certain PA SEMI/Apple is no different; they certainly have the silicon space to waste writing Application-specific-accelerators for acing benchmarking tasks, especially on a platform with as much opacity as Apple holds over the iPhone.

dragonwriter 9y ago
> The problem is that basically Qualcomm is strangling the entire cellphone space. So what if you built a completely new, much faster, much better-in-every-way SoC... if you still have to pay Qualcomm for the entire chipset because they refuse to sell you just the modem without you paying the full bill. If Qualcomm is that big of a drag on Android (or not-Apple, but it amounts to the same thing) smartphones, maybe the solution is for Google to buy them outright and rearrange their practices. Sure, it'd be expensive, but not anything Google couldn't afford.

bitmapbrother 9y ago

Why not also blame Samsung for their Exynos or Huawei for their Kirin? Do you know what all 3 of these 3 SoC's have in common? They all use the same reference design developed by ARM. None of these SoC makers are going to spend the additional billions in SoC R&D deviating from the ARM design. If you really want to see a change then it must begin with ARM. >Qualcomm doesn't really seem capable of keeping up with what Apple is doing. Snapdragon 835 came out 6 months after the A10, and scored about 2/3 as well at single core, and less than 10% on Geekbench 4. A11 scored twice what the 835 did on single core, and over 50% more on multi core, and the 835 is going to be the best chip available in the U.S. for Android until sometime next year. Qualcomm and Apple are on different release cycles. The SD 845 will be in the same ballpark in multicore score and about 25% slower in single core than the A11.

jrs95 9y ago
You could blame them as well, it's just a lot less relevant to the U.S. smartphone market (where iPhone has the highest market share AFAIK) since everyone is on Snapdragon here. As for Qualcomm and Apple being on different release cycles...that's exactly the problem! They're 6 months behind AND still have worse performance, plus due to their deal with Samsung, it's going to take even longer than that for any other manufacturers to ship devices with 845. As another comment said, it's not really going to be profitable for any company to try and compete with Apple on this. Which is why if it is going to happen, it's going to have to be done by someone like Google who has a vested interest in it beyond profitability from the chips themselves. If ARM reference designs can't keep up with what Apple is doing, and nobody else is willing to invest to go beyond them, Android will fall behind in the high end of the market.