4 ms·

The more interesting point... >The demo wasn't perfect: the game ran at 1080p with fairly middling settings, but did so at what appeared to be at the very leas

The more interesting point... >The demo wasn't perfect: the game ran at 1080p with fairly middling settings, but did so at what appeared to be at the very least a steady 30FPS, all while being run as an emulated x86 version of the game. That is: the game wasn't even natively compiled for ARM. But consider that Intel's most powerful laptop chipset GPU, found in the 10th generation Ice Lake series, is not capable of breaking single digit frame rates on this game at 1080p. Apple received some snark about this demo being lame, but it's only lame if you don't understand at all just how terrible modern integrated laptop GPUs are. https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/06/22/apples-chipset-advantage-has-me-more-jealous-than-ever https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/06/22/apples-chipset-adva...

monocasa 6y ago
We all know that Intel iGPUs are terrible (at least until the new Xe based GPUs start to come out). The comparison I don't see enough people making is to throw out as an option the one company that regularly ships semi custom, secure, x86 SoCs with GPUs, AMD. An Xbox One SoC is literally half of the transistor count of an A12Z (5B and 10B respectively). And the frame rate was anything but steady there. And calling it "middling settings" is pushing it as well, the env lighting wasn't even on Lara. It looks like they dropped the settings as far down as they would go.
- GeekyBear 6y ago
  Yet the marketing push for Ice Lake was that even if the CPU cores lost most of their IPC gains to lower clock speeds, the GPU itself was to be a massive improvement. I'm looking forward to seeing if the demos were on the Dev Kit hardware, because if that was the performance on a specially binned two year old iPad Pro chip, it's pretty darn impressive.
  - monocasa 6y ago
    It's Tiger Lake that's supposed to see the passable GPU, when they use the same cores as their new discrete GPU. Not that I'm really defending Intel here, they fell behind the curve.
    - GeekyBear 6y ago
      Jam tomorrow, but never jam today? With Intel, I've gotten to the point where I'll only believe their marketing spiel after the hardware ships and the claims are confirmed by third party testing. However, they did indeed market Ice Lake as a huge GPU improvement.
      - monocasa 6y ago
        Lol, like I said, Intel is obviously out of the picture. I'm not really defending them, just being as charitable to their side as I can for the sake of argument. But yes, their GPUs are perennially terrible, and their fab side has too many issues these days to rely on being able to ship a leading edge process node at scale. I'm just on the side that a semicustom AMD APU would have made way more sense for the stated reasons of the arch switch, as you would have been able to have all the power/watt and raw GPU perf improvements (if not more) without switching arch from under your users. And the Xbox One is an incredibly secure chip that'll be the first major game console I know of to not be hacked to allow unsigned code during it's lifetime, and that's while running games in kernel mode. I think the real reason for the switch is the fact that catalyst runs iOS apps unmodified on macOS/aarch64. When you look at their 10-K that's where they make their real money, and I suspect that they had a hard conversation about the mac app store not meeting expectations and this is how they intend to get macs on that same gravy train. That has a lot of implications for their incentive structure going forward that doesn't look great for people who want a genreal purpose computer ala Cory Doctorow's "The Coming War on General Computation".
        GeekyBear 6y ago
        I think the real reason for the switch is the same as the switch away from PPC to Intel. Higher performance per watt and less waste heat. AMD going from an also-ran to highly competitive is certainly impressive. However, it's not "more than double the performance of the competition for less than half the power budget" level impressive. >In the face-off against a Cortex-A55 implementation such as on the Snapdragon 855, the new Thunder cores represent a 2.5-3x performance lead while at the same time using less than half the energy. https://www.anandtech.com/show/14892/the-apple-iphone-11-pro-and-max-review/2 https://www.anandtech.com/show/14892/the-apple-iphone-11-pro... However, that's in the mobile space. Time will tell how well Apple does competing in the laptop/desktop arena.
FireBeyond 6y ago
> Apple received some snark about this demo being lame, but it's only lame if you don't understand at all just how terrible modern integrated laptop GPUs are. We do know that. But we also know that the high end laptop market is not all about iGPUs. Entry and mid level consumer and business laptop, maybe, but if you buy a $1,500+ Dell laptop, you're not getting iGPU only. So not exactly the best comparison. MBPs _start_ at $1,299.

monocasa 6y ago

We all know that Intel iGPUs are terrible (at least until the new Xe based GPUs start to come out). The comparison I don't see enough people making is to throw out as an option the one company that regularly ships semi custom, secure, x86 SoCs with GPUs, AMD. An Xbox One SoC is literally half of the transistor count of an A12Z (5B and 10B respectively). And the frame rate was anything but steady there. And calling it "middling settings" is pushing it as well, the env lighting wasn't even on Lara. It looks like they dropped the settings as far down as they would go.

GeekyBear 6y ago
Yet the marketing push for Ice Lake was that even if the CPU cores lost most of their IPC gains to lower clock speeds, the GPU itself was to be a massive improvement. I'm looking forward to seeing if the demos were on the Dev Kit hardware, because if that was the performance on a specially binned two year old iPad Pro chip, it's pretty darn impressive.
- monocasa 6y ago
  It's Tiger Lake that's supposed to see the passable GPU, when they use the same cores as their new discrete GPU. Not that I'm really defending Intel here, they fell behind the curve.
  - GeekyBear 6y ago
    Jam tomorrow, but never jam today? With Intel, I've gotten to the point where I'll only believe their marketing spiel after the hardware ships and the claims are confirmed by third party testing. However, they did indeed market Ice Lake as a huge GPU improvement.
    - monocasa 6y ago
      Lol, like I said, Intel is obviously out of the picture. I'm not really defending them, just being as charitable to their side as I can for the sake of argument. But yes, their GPUs are perennially terrible, and their fab side has too many issues these days to rely on being able to ship a leading edge process node at scale. I'm just on the side that a semicustom AMD APU would have made way more sense for the stated reasons of the arch switch, as you would have been able to have all the power/watt and raw GPU perf improvements (if not more) without switching arch from under your users. And the Xbox One is an incredibly secure chip that'll be the first major game console I know of to not be hacked to allow unsigned code during it's lifetime, and that's while running games in kernel mode. I think the real reason for the switch is the fact that catalyst runs iOS apps unmodified on macOS/aarch64. When you look at their 10-K that's where they make their real money, and I suspect that they had a hard conversation about the mac app store not meeting expectations and this is how they intend to get macs on that same gravy train. That has a lot of implications for their incentive structure going forward that doesn't look great for people who want a genreal purpose computer ala Cory Doctorow's "The Coming War on General Computation".
      - GeekyBear 6y ago
        I think the real reason for the switch is the same as the switch away from PPC to Intel. Higher performance per watt and less waste heat. AMD going from an also-ran to highly competitive is certainly impressive. However, it's not "more than double the performance of the competition for less than half the power budget" level impressive. >In the face-off against a Cortex-A55 implementation such as on the Snapdragon 855, the new Thunder cores represent a 2.5-3x performance lead while at the same time using less than half the energy. https://www.anandtech.com/show/14892/the-apple-iphone-11-pro-and-max-review/2 https://www.anandtech.com/show/14892/the-apple-iphone-11-pro... However, that's in the mobile space. Time will tell how well Apple does competing in the laptop/desktop arena.

FireBeyond 6y ago

> Apple received some snark about this demo being lame, but it's only lame if you don't understand at all just how terrible modern integrated laptop GPUs are. We do know that. But we also know that the high end laptop market is not all about iGPUs. Entry and mid level consumer and business laptop, maybe, but if you buy a $1,500+ Dell laptop, you're not getting iGPU only. So not exactly the best comparison. MBPs _start_ at $1,299.