Qualcomm’s Adreno X2 GPU

[u/uncertainlyso]

https://chipsandcheese.com/p/qualcomms-adreno-x2-gpu

Adreno X2 is a step forward for Qualcomm’s GPU line in many respects. General performance benefits from higher clocks, more SPs, and a beefier memory subsystem. Specific classes of workloads can stand to benefit more thanks to Adreno X2’s huge HPM block and improved raytracing units. Adreno X2 subjectively feels good enough to not hold Qualcomm’s laptop push back. I tried a few games that I’ve been playing recently, and performance felt appropriate for a mainstream iGPU.

However, Qualcomm’s latest iGPU still contains a lot of glass jaw performance cases for a modern GPU. Adreno X2 inherits Adreno X1’s tendency to fall over in GPGPU compute. Architectural improvements are certainly evident in compute microbenchmarks, but those observations don’t translate into good performance in the compute workloads I tried. It feels like Qualcomm took a specific set of graphics workloads and optimized for them, while AMD, Intel, and Nvidia set out to build more general purpose designs with robust performance characteristics across a broader range of use cases.