Qualcomm's PC Snapdragon has Over 8 Billion Transistors

AlphaAtlas

[H]ard|Gawd
Staff member
Joined
Mar 3, 2018
Messages
1,713
The German site Winfuture reports that Qualcomm's first "PC" processor is a massive chip by ARM SOC standards. The octacore SXC8180 packs a total of 8.5 billion transistors into a single chip, a substantial jump over the 6.9 billion in the 7nm Apple A12 and Kirin 980, not to mention the 5.9 billion in Qualcomm's own 845. For reference, AMD's Raven Ridge die used in some low power laptops has 4.94 billion transistors. Winfuture previously said that the Snapdragon 1000 series is supposed to feature a 12W TDP, and that the design is built for laptops instead of tablets or smartphones.

Considering the details and the fact that the SCX8180 is manufactured by the Taiwanese contract manufacturer TSMC in a process with only seven nanometers of structure width, an obvious question arises: why Qualcomm uses the enormously increased number of transistors.
 
increased memory bandwidth, more cache, additional I/O support, I mean really, its that big and may only consume 12w max? that's pretty cool.
 
But can it play Crysis?

(Sorry, just had to)

I'd be curious how it benches against the usual x86 suspects. That would probably be difficult though, as you'd have to find ARM compatible software to do the benchmarks in, and then you'd have to wonder how much of the performance is due to differing hardware, and how much is due to differing software maturity.
 
Last edited:
If it can do 4k native hardware compression I'm all ears.
 
I'd be curious how it benches against the usual x86 suspects. That would probably be difficult though, as you'd have to find ARM compatible software to do the benchmarks in, and then you'd have to wonder how much of the performance is due to differing hardware, and how much is due to differing software maturity.
Did I misunderstand, and that the Win10 with ARM support didn't have a wrapper to provide you the ability to run x86 programs? I thought that was kinda the whole point of all of this, was to allow people to gain the ability to use all their software whilst having a less power hungry hardware to run it on...

Personally, I still want an AMD Opteron A1100 system, for no other reason than "just because" lol
However, with Windows now being a capable OS for an ARM chip, and since they do have PCIe lanes, it'd make for a very interesting platform to toy with! Granted, I suspect this Snapdragon 1000 will have far more oomph, it won't have the ability to run a graphics card of my choice ;)
 
Did I misunderstand, and that the Win10 with ARM support didn't have a wrapper to provide you the ability to run x86 programs? I thought that was kinda the whole point of all of this, was to allow people to gain the ability to use all their software whilst having a less power hungry hardware to run it on...

Personally, I still want an AMD Opteron A1100 system, for no other reason than "just because" lol
However, with Windows now being a capable OS for an ARM chip, and since they do have PCIe lanes, it'd make for a very interesting platform to toy with! Granted, I suspect this Snapdragon 1000 will have far more oomph, it won't have the ability to run a graphics card of my choice ;)


There may be a wrapper, but hardware translation always incurrs a significant performance penalty, so it would not be an apt comparison.
 
Last edited:
There may be a wrapper, but hardwares lation always incurrs a significant performance penalty, so it would not be an apt comparison.
Granted, but if it's sufficiently multithreaded (the wrapper), which I'd assume they'd leverage that aspect given the fact they're well aware of the lacking instruction set, the 8 cores may surprise us :p

That, or......
$5 says the majority of that bumped transistor count is i/o and gpu.
... we are in for a real surprise, and AMD is licensing them all-of, or just aspects of, the AMD64 instructions. :pompous: Though, while I'd think that'd be awfully interesting, I'd figure AMD would've done that with the Opteron if it were a viable solution.

My serious assumption was that it's indeed I/O. The usual stuff a PC needs: PCIe, SATA, additional USB, WiFi (assuming that isn't already baked into the Snapdragon), and Gigabit NIC. But I agree that incorporating a few more GPU cores wouldn't hurt, assuming that they are modular like that. I know that some of them have been, but limited out on the max number.
 
Really hoping this takes off as a viable solution.
Same. Be good for some kickass NUCs and all in one/portable mid range gaming setups.
I want to use it for industrial/commercial stuff if it has strong hardware encoding.
 
Back
Top