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'Snapdragon 1000' Chip May Be Designed For PCs From the Ground Up (engadget.com)

Posted by msmash on from the up-next dept.

Qualcomm's Snapdragon 850 processor may be intended for PCs, but it's still a half step -- it's really a higher-clocked version of the same processor you'd find in your phone. The company may be more adventurous the next time, though. From a report: WinFuture says it has obtained details surrounding SDM1000 (possibly Snapdragon 1000), a previously hinted-at CPU that would be designed from the start for PCs. It would have a relatively huge design compared to most ARM designs (20mm x 15mm) and would consume a laptop-like 12W of power across the entire system-on-a-chip. It would compete directly with Intel's low-power Core processors where the existing 835 isn't really in the ballpark. A reference design found in import databases might give a clue as to what you could expect: it'd have up to 16GB of RAM and two 128GB storage modules.

63 of 104 comments (clear)

  1. Anyone know if it's going to run 64 bit apps? by rsilvergun · · Score: 1

    As I understand the last one didn't. If it's got full compatibility then I could see Intel and AMD (especially Intel) really starting to worry.

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    1. Re:Anyone know if it's going to run 64 bit apps? by TheRaven64 · · Score: 5, Informative

      Do you mean 64-bit x86 applications or 64-bit ARM applications? This chip is using 64-bit ARM cores, so will run 64-bit software natively. Whether it runs 64-bit x86 software is a question of the functionality of the emulator, not of the hardware. I don't believe that Microsoft's x86 emulator supports 64-bit programs yet, but it was announced to be on the roadmap a few months back.

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    2. Re:Anyone know if it's going to run 64 bit apps? by Daemonik · · Score: 2

      32 or 64bit isn't really the issue. They're still ARM chips and not x86 compatible, so you're stuck using Universal Windows Apps through the Windows Store.

    3. Re:Anyone know if it's going to run 64 bit apps? by Desler · · Score: 1

      Not true at all. The previous ones could do 32-bit Win32 apps using emulation.

    4. Re:Anyone know if it's going to run 64 bit apps? by Joce640k · · Score: 1

      If Microsoft can compile Windows/Office/Edge/Visual Studio/.Net/etc. in native ARM code and run other software via. an emulator then they've got a good proposition for for a lot of people.

      I assume native versions of major apps like Firefox/Chrome/etc. will be ready for launch day. What else does the average user need?

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    5. Re:Anyone know if it's going to run 64 bit apps? by rsilvergun · · Score: 1

      Sorry, 64 bit x86

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    6. Re:Anyone know if it's going to run 64 bit apps? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Anything can run anything through emulation.

    7. Re:Anyone know if it's going to run 64 bit apps? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      No, *you're* stuck. I can run Linux and BSD on my ARM chips.

    8. Re: Anyone know if it's going to run 64 bit apps? by Miamicanes · · Score: 4, Interesting

      And unless the Snapdragon 1000 is miraculously clocked at something impossible with present technology, like 8,000MHz, any i7 -- even a dualcore mobile one that's basically *shit* -- will completely roast it at running x86 & AMD64 apps.

      x86/AMD64 have literally evolved hand-in-hand with Windows for 30 years. Today, "pure" RISC might reduce costs & allow high performance for apps built to run the "RISC" way, but when it comes to maximum balls-to-the-wall brute-force winning performance, AMD64 wins, hands down. A modern best-of-breed AMD64 chip is basically a RISC chip, augmented by thousands of additional specialized instructions to accelerate things that Windows (and Linux) PCs *do*. AMD64 processors are basically now like self-optimizing JIT compilers for x86 assembly, with plenty of additional tricks to accelerate and optimize nearly every chokepoint known to exist in Windows (and Linux).

      My phone has a Snapdragon 850 with 4x1.5GHz + 4x2GHz cores, 3 gigs of RAM, and 128 gigs of eMMC SSD. Frankly, Acrobat Viewer runs faster on an ancient, creaky 15 year old Compaq Armada m700 with 500mhz Pentium III, 512mb, and a noname PATA SSD from China (that probabiy has microSD cards hand-soldered to an ASIC inside) than it does on my phone.

      When comparing ARM to AMD64, specs alone don't come anywhere CLOSE to telling the real story.

      What's that? It's for people who "just" use it for running browser-based apps? Ok, go to walmart.com, amazon.com, or sears.com with the fastest ARM-based phone or tablet you can find, and compare the experience to even a *shit* AMD64-based PC or laptop. The PC or laptop will win, hands-down, because Javascript performance in particular suffers *horribly* on ARM compared to AMD64. Sites like the aforementioned that build pages from the inside-out using Javascript, DOM, and AJAX work just fine on a real computer, but turn into a minefield of delayed clicks and pages that keep reflowing and recomposing more slowly than you can see, but faster than your finger can react once you go to touch something.

      ARM is why we can't have nice things like Aero Glass anymore (MS took it away & forced Metro on us because otherwise, Windows would have been unusably slow on crap ARM-based tablets). Dammit, it's almost 2020... we should have UIs with butter-smooth realtime-raytraced refraction & translucency effects by now, not something that looks like a fsck'ing mess of Post-It notes.

    9. Re:Anyone know if it's going to run 64 bit apps? by b0s0z0ku · · Score: 1

      Emulation = slow 'n buggy.

    10. Re: Anyone know if it's going to run 64 bit apps? by MoarSauce123 · · Score: 1

      The corporate market for the most part does not care what processor is in a box. They sign contracts with Dell or Lenovo or some other vendor and have per employee type and level a set budget for systems that include whatever OS the vendor puts on it. Additionally, they sign a deal with Microsoft to license Office 365 for X users. If those puppies run Intel, AMD, or Qualcomm is not that important except when it impacts cost.

    11. Re:Anyone know if it's going to run 64 bit apps? by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 1

      Not necessarily. True, a high quality implementation is going to be large because quality emulators are compilers, but there might be great demand for x86-on-ARM emulators and therefore a correspondingly large funding for those efforts.

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    12. Re: Anyone know if it's going to run 64 bit apps? by greenwow · · Score: 1

      > run IE7 or whatever standard they never updated from.

      Or worse, IE6 since they still use SharePoint and are stuck with 6.

      For most features on our web site, we schedule more time to get the feature to work under MSIE 6 than we schedule to create the feature! MSIE is such a huge wasteful drain on development resources. I shouldn't complain since for me it means job security since I've been programming for IE since Microsoft first bought it from Spyglass.

    13. Re: Anyone know if it's going to run 64 bit apps? by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 2

      My phone has a Snapdragon 850 with 4x1.5GHz + 4x2GHz cores, 3 gigs of RAM, and 128 gigs of eMMC SSD. Frankly, Acrobat Viewer runs faster on an ancient, creaky 15 year old Compaq Armada m700 with 500mhz Pentium III, 512mb, and a noname PATA SSD from China (that probabiy has microSD cards hand-soldered to an ASIC inside) than it does on my phone.

      And your phone and the PC are otherwise running the same OS?

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    14. Re:Anyone know if it's going to run 64 bit apps? by Desler · · Score: 2

      Maybe if purely software which this wasn't using. Hardware-based emuation using instruction tranlsation can be much more performant even if not nearly 100% of native.

    15. Re: Anyone know if it's going to run 64 bit apps? by Miamicanes · · Score: 1

      No, but I have yet to encounter a device capable of running both Windows and Android where the performance of Windows wasn't profoundly worse than the performance of Android.

      The fact is, even for undemanding and technologically-illiterate users, slow computers suck. Using touchscreens when the display keeps mutating and changing under your finger (so the screen re-composes ~200ms AFTER you start moving your finger towards the screen, but ~100ms BEFORE it actually REACHES the screen) is UNBELIEVABLY frustrating. Ditto, for times where you touch the screen and don't get instant visual feedback & have to decide between touching the screen again (and risking having the touch register & the screen re-composing again midway between starting the motion and touching the screen) or waiting.

      One serious deficiency of ALL current touch-based UIs... touching the screen triggers whatever is at that precise point at the moment touch occurs, not what was at that point ~100ms or so earlier (when the muscles began moving, but before you'd have had time to notice and react to a sudden unexpected screen recomposition). Microsoft, Google, Linux in general, and Apple ALL suffer from this problem. Someone needs to come up with a way for touch UIs to gracefully deal with ambiguous touch events that occur in the 150ms or so AFTER a screen-recomposition that changes the target of a touch event. Say, maintaining a touchzone history for a few hundred milliseconds after any changes... if the system detects a touch or gesture that WOULD have had a different outcome had it occurred 150ms earlier, have it automatically ignore the gesture AND unambiguously & instantly make it clear to the user (preferably, by some tactile means... say, multiple vibrators at opposite ends of the device, pulsed in a sequence with an unmistakable feel).

    16. Re: Anyone know if it's going to run 64 bit apps? by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 1

      Because you're comparing two different programs at that point, not one program on two CPU architectures.

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    17. Re: Anyone know if it's going to run 64 bit apps? by ChunderDownunder · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Bear in mind a phone CPU is optimised for a minuscule battery inside a fanless enclosure. This 1000 series will be tuned for 2-in-1 laptop performance.
      That said, Google's venture into ARM64 Chromebooks should result in performance gains on V8 as they fine tune the OS.

    18. Re: Anyone know if it's going to run 64 bit apps? by Joce640k · · Score: 1

      The steam catalogue.

      Maybe you're not the target demographic.

      (and maybe the world doesn't revolve around you)

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      No sig today...
    19. Re:Anyone know if it's going to run 64 bit apps? by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 1

      and have you eve considered how many more additional opcodes are required to run to emulate one single opcode for different architecture

      That greatly depends on the similarity of the two architectures and the cleverness of the dynamic translator, so it's impossible to make a blanket statement.

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    20. Re: Anyone know if it's going to run 64 bit apps? by AmiMoJo · · Score: 1

      PDF viewing and web sites like Amazon work just fine on ARM Chromebooks. Maybe Chrome's JS engine is better than whatever you are using, because it's used for both.

      Your comment about MS removing Aero Glass because of ARM is just bizarre. Have you not noticed that phones tend to have far more graphical flourishes and effects than desktops? And at comparable or higher resolutions too, with 1920x1080 being decidedly mid-range for a phone now.

      Mobile GPUs are pretty powerful and, like desktop ones, offload a lot of the intensive work such as video decoding. The lack of graphical effects in Windows is because Microsoft are shit at design, that's all.

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    21. Re: Anyone know if it's going to run 64 bit apps? by jbengt · · Score: 1

      The average computer user is unfamiliar with Steam, let alone its' catalog.

    22. Re: Anyone know if it's going to run 64 bit apps? by greenwow · · Score: 1

      Depends on the version. We have customers still using really old versions of SharePoint after upgrades to newer versions failed.

    23. Re: Anyone know if it's going to run 64 bit apps? by Miamicanes · · Score: 1

      No, the decision to eliminate Aero Glass was deliberate & based on a perceived need to make Windows run acceptably on tablet & netbook-class hardware, which is MASSIVELY inferior in performance to any hardware most of us would consider remotely acceptable.

      GPU capabilities have improved, but back when the first netbooks & tablets appeared, there were a lot of scenarios where Windows was being run with 24-bit color, but the GPU could only do hardware-accelerated transformations in 15/16-bit color... so you had to either run Windows with 15/16-bit color all the time, do without GPU acceleration at all, or try to fudge it by dropping down to 15/16-bit color during transitions, then going back to 24-bit color afterwards. #3 ended up looking worse than you'd expect it to, #1 would have gotten the computer killed by bad reviews, so we mostly ended up with strategy #2. Aero glass with strategy #2 on a computer with wimpy hardware to begin with just wasn't viable.

      Microsoft's big fuck up was killing off Aero Glass entirely, instead of keeping it as the selling point for premium hardware and letting netbooks fall back to "the ugly Windows 2000 look". By trying to keep netbooks from sucking too horribly, they killed off a major reason for average users to buy higher-end hardware and subsidize the computers WE buy. Ergo, today you can buy a shit netbook for $199, but even $1500+ laptops have optical drives that literally wear out & break after 2-3 years, shitty keyboards, and inadequate cooling (and fans that break down) that causes them to cook themselves to death within a few years.

      What Microsoft REALLY needs to do is quit pandering to the low end, and start giving people compelling reasons to DEMAND more powerful hardware again... and I can think of few things better than realtime-raytraced glass effects to drive consumer demand for it, even among non-gamers.

    24. Re:Anyone know if it's going to run 64 bit apps? by DamnOregonian · · Score: 1

      After this hits, it will take about 45 minutes for someone to have a Linux distro up and running on it.

      I wish, but nope.
      There are Qualcomm 835 laptops on the market already. I own one. Still no Linux.
      It's a little harder than you think building a BSP for the kernel when you have literally no idea what's going on in the boot process, hardware or software wise.

  2. Arm works fine as a desktop. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    We're doing some work with nvidia arm-based modules. The development system is Ubuntu with all the bells and whistles, plenty fast for a desktop. And the thing's the size of a pcmcia card (remember those?).

  3. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 1

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  4. Not for PCs. by Gravis+Zero · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This wouldn't be engineered for PCs, this would be engineered for budget laptops AKA tablets with keyboards. What's the difference? PCs have a common bus (or at least can outsource the job), the modern one being PCIe. Honestly, this is still just another beefed up smartphone chip.

    Tell me when they make a chip with a PCIe root complex and then i'll tell you they made a chip made for PCs.

    --
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    1. Re:Not for PCs. by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      Did the 8086 have the isa bus in it? if it didn't by any chance was it a real processor?

      Since we're talking about SoCs, the hardware is expected to be onboard.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    2. Re:Not for PCs. by Kjella · · Score: 1

      You do realize that the desktop market is much smaller than the laptop market right? And unless your laptop has a TB3 port and you're using it with a docking station, RAID enclosure or something similar that actually speaks PCIe then nobody cares what goes on internally. Users just care that the external ports work, primarily the screen (HDMI/DP) and all things USB. Heck many business desktops probably don't have a single expansion card either and the AIOs are usually laptops in drag. If I'm generous I'd say max 1/3rd of the PC market cares. And if you made a GPU-specific port again I doubt more than a few percent care about the rest.

      --
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    3. Re:Not for PCs. by technosaurus · · Score: 1

      There are some already, but I like the rockpro64 https://liliputing.com/2018/01...

    4. Re:Not for PCs. by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      Since we're talking about SoCs, the hardware is expected to be onboard.

      please try to keep up, the power management, the accelerometer and the mass storage are not expected to be onboard
      and you do need buses for these things

      None of those things require PCIE, which is the bus we're talking about right now. Please do try to stay on topic.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    5. Re:Not for PCs. by Gravis+Zero · · Score: 1

      sadly, no. it supports a single PCIe device which is to say they hacked up a special controller for one device. http://rockchip.wikidot.com/rk...

      supporting a single PCIe device a PCIe root complex does not make.

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    6. Re:Not for PCs. by Gravis+Zero · · Score: 1

      that's super and all but it doesn't change the objective reality that this is just another SoC and not PC CPU.

      --
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    7. Re:Not for PCs. by tlhIngan · · Score: 1

      PCs have a common bus (or at least can outsource the job), the modern one being PCIe. Honestly, this is still just another beefed up smartphone chip.

      You realize the SnapDragon chips, since at least the 820, has had PCIe onboard? Heck, the iPhone has had PCIe-connected SSD storage for a couple of years now (yes, it uses PCIe SSD controller, it's why it gets such high flash memory access scores - they're topping out around 1GB/sec, which while slower than a modern NVMe drive for a PC, is still faster than SATA3 and is pretty decent, after all, it's just an iPhone).

      PCIe on a smartphone chip isn't unusual - it's designed for the higher speed interconnects.

      This chip will certainly continue having PCIe on it. Though I wonder if Qualcomm has fixed several issues with it. It was pretty lame last time I tried to use it.

    8. Re:Not for PCs. by Gravis+Zero · · Score: 1

      supporting a single PCIe device a PCIe root complex does not make.

      --
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  5. And what would you plug in that slot? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    So you'd plug what in? A modem card?

    Not a flash card because they're all flash now anyway. Graphics are built right into the SOC with a much faster internal bus, so not a graphics card. Peripheral are all USB these days.

    What exactly would you plug into the slot, and why do laptops not have that slot and yet still sell?

    1. Re:And what would you plug in that slot? by b0s0z0ku · · Score: 2

      Would it be able to support fast SATA or M.2 flash storage without an external bus? Some of us like our storage NOT to be soldered to the motherboard.

    2. Re:And what would you plug in that slot? by Highdude702 · · Score: 1

      they do actually, its normally where the network card is plugged into. unless you get one of th ose shitty laptops you cant open.

    3. Re:And what would you plug in that slot? by b0s0z0ku · · Score: 1

      Network card? Isn't the fuuuuuuttttturrrree wireless? What are you, a Luddite? :)

      (Assuming that wifi is built in to the SoC.)

    4. Re:And what would you plug in that slot? by _merlin · · Score: 2

      My desktop has PCIe slots populated with dual NV Quadro GPUs, an accelerated 2*40Gbps Ethernet NIC, and a SAS controller. Some people really can't get enough PCIe lanes.

    5. Re:And what would you plug in that slot? by Highdude702 · · Score: 1

      I think AC summed it up rather well.

  6. Biggest and most complex SoC by OrangeTide · · Score: 3, Interesting

    That would be NVIDIA's latest ARM SoC at 350 mm2.

    --
    “Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
    1. Re:Biggest and most complex SoC by OrangeTide · · Score: 1

      There is some funky stuff in there in addition to the volta for processing lots of camera data for neural nets. But yea the GPU is the biggest piece of it.

      --
      “Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
  7. Wait for Real World Tests by Luthair · · Score: 1

    Qualcomm and Microsoft were proclaiming they'd be competitive prior to the recent Windows on Arm which turned out to be a dumpster fire. Despite claims by the gadget press that you have a "super computer" in your pocket no one has yet to show they are remotely close to anything available today from Intel or AMD.

    1. Re:Wait for Real World Tests by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      The windows emulation might not be any good, but native arm64 benchmarks on my android phone were mostly between half and two thirds the speed of the same benchmarks running on an Intel Core i7-3770.

      That's fast enough that speed is no longer the reason my phone isn't my primary computing device. Windows software could be compiled to native ARM code if there was demand for it. Lack of an HDMI output could be fixed (I think a few android phones still support it). Storage space is more difficult, because it should really be modular and SD cards probably aren't quite right (if the hardware even supports them). The battery should really be more modular too.

      Linux or BSD driver support for Snapdragon is presumably trash, making the particular chip from the article less useful.

    2. Re:Wait for Real World Tests by jdschulteis · · Score: 1

      Qualcomm and Microsoft were proclaiming they'd be competitive prior to the recent Windows on Arm which turned out to be a dumpster fire. Despite claims by the gadget press that you have a "super computer" in your pocket no one has yet to show they are remotely close to anything available today from Intel or AMD.

      When they say "supercomputer in your pocket" they are comparing a modern cell phone to a supercomputer from 20 years ago.

      This chip doesn't need to keep up with the latest powerhouse desktop chips from Intel and AMD. If it runs a web browser as well as a 10 year old desktop chip, but with 12W TDP, it'll be fine for the target market.

    3. Re:Wait for Real World Tests by Luthair · · Score: 1

      When they say "supercomputer in your pocket" they are comparing a modern cell phone to a supercomputer from 20 years ago.

      I'm well aware of that.

      This chip doesn't need to keep up with the latest powerhouse desktop chips from Intel and AMD. If it runs a web browser as well as a 10 year old desktop chip, but with 12W TDP, it'll be fine for the target market.

      The internet has changed an awful lot in the past 10-years, I think you'd be surprised how badly 10-year old CPUs perform.

  8. Re:But, the PC is dead!? by greenwow · · Score: 2

    What is a computer?

  9. Microsoft? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Who cares about Microsoft?

    1. Re:Microsoft? by Joce640k · · Score: 1

      Who cares about Microsoft?

      Every computer seller in the entire world...?

      --
      No sig today...
    2. Re:Microsoft? by gravewax · · Score: 1

      90% of the PC using planet that uses Microsoft based software or services.

  10. Wouldn't these things have USB? by rsilvergun · · Score: 1

    And isn't that a common bus? Not as fast as PCIe so you're not gonna be running a GTA 1080 off it but it's still a bus isn't it?

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    1. Re:Wouldn't these things have USB? by Gravis+Zero · · Score: 1

      USB is an example of a port, the distinction being that it's an external device. Lots of stuff used to plug into serial ports but that didn't mean you considered any device to have a serial port to be a PC. Sure, it's semantic distinction and arguably subjective but that's what this all about to start with. However, if you're ignoring all that, I have a PC to sell you, it's called "Arduino". ;)

      --
      Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
  11. Damn MS and Apple by technosaurus · · Score: 3, Interesting

    PC used to mean Personal Computer. That could be any architecture. Somewhere along the line (possibly before those Mac vs PC commercials) PC came to be assumed Windows on Intel (most Luddites don't even know about AMD, much less VIA and other x86 competitors) A PC could be SuperH architecture running FreeBSD. IIRC, there was a company that tried to trademark "PC LAPTOPS", but PC had become so associated with Windows and Intel that the examiners sited the use of PC as an adjective.

    1. Re:Damn MS and Apple by AmiMoJo · · Score: 2

      My wife and most of her friends call iPads "computers". The fact that it runs a mobile OS and has no keyboard seems to be irrelevant...

      --
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      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    2. Re:Damn MS and Apple by jbengt · · Score: 1

      Somewhere along the line (possibly before those Mac vs PC commercials) PC came to be assumed Windows on Intel . . .

      The shift in usage started when IBM came out with the "IBM PC" personal computer, and then IBM competitors copied, I mean, reverse-engineered IBM's BIOS and sold "IBM PC compatible" computers. When the clones became popular, the phrase was shortened in general use to "PC".

    3. Re:Damn MS and Apple by TheRaven64 · · Score: 1

      When the clones became popular, the phrase was shortened in general use to "PC".

      And, in particular, when the clone vendors wanted to highlight that they ran DOS / Windows and downplay the fact that they were compatible with an old IBM machine. No one likes advertising their competitor's product in their marketing material.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  12. Cool! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Cool, we can have a nice 32/64 bit cpu, with no 16/8 bit cruft, or segmented nonsense, with real protection, designed by a company that knows CPUs.

    Now excuse me, I have to update my BIOS to patch spectre, meltdown, and further degrade the performance of an already slow cpu. I also need to upgrade the power supply, as it wants *more* power now.

  13. Not used to be. Is. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    p.c. = polizical cuntrectness.
    PC = personal computer.

    b = bit.
    B = byte = n bit.
    kB = 2^10 byte = 1024 byte.

    hacker = somebody who tinkers with computers (as in: hacks away at the keyboard).
    cracker = somebody who breaks into (computer) security systems.

    And everybody who spreads different definitions, is a clueless cargo cult kid raised by the clueless media industry's clueless discussion of these things.

  14. Not unless they fix ... by tlambert · · Score: 1

    Not unless they fix ...

    Their notoriously bad memory bandwidth in the redesign.

  15. Re:What's the problem though? by ChunderDownunder · · Score: 1

    Qualcomm, and most Android OEMs, don't care about upstream kernels. So you're typically left with an unsupported ancient github kernel fork. *If* the LineageOS community maintain it you may get security patches...

    And that's running the Android flavour - good luck trying to run a glibc GNU/Linux like Ubuntu on the thing without some sort of libhybris compatibility hack.

  16. Seems huge by samwichse · · Score: 2

    This thing is 300mm^2?

    That seems huge considering a Ryzen 1800X is 213mm^2...

    I mean, I know it has all the system on a chip stuff in there, too, but still, that's giant.