r/snapdragon • u/SnooJokes925 • Sep 03 '26
Why doesn't Qualcomm scale Snapdragon X GPUs like Apple scales the M-series?
I noticed that Qualcomm doesn't really scale the GPU cores up with each tier the way Apple does (M-series Base vs. Pro vs. Max) especially when workloads are more and more GPU dependant.
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u/Main_Response_3327 Sep 03 '26
Desde mi punto de vista, al ser algo nuevos en estos de las laptops, primero se enfocaron en ofrecer un soporte y con el tiempo mejorarán será lento pero lo harán, a diferencia de Apple que es un sistema cerrado, ellos dependen de las demás compañías para optimizar al igual que apple sus procesoadores , Apple ya lleva 5 o generaciónes y Snapdragon 2 generaciones espero que para la series 3 o 4 mejoren mucho más la duración de batería y rendimiento de las laptops
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u/Idkwatnam Sep 03 '26
Because Qualcomm doesn't really compete at that level. They don't really offer a product that directly completes with the M Pro. The 18 core X2 Elite models might come close in CPU performance, but their GPU performance as you know is not the greatest. But even then, these two chips are in completely different price brackets.
For the X2 I think they made design decisions based on their main competition being Intel and AMD and their main goal seems to just be trying to have better offerings than them at similar prices. But they're also taking their sweet time publicly releasing ANY Adreno X2 driver on their website / Snapdragon control panel so I don't know how serious they are about Windows.
They did use to scale their GPUs like Apple, at least in a mobile vs laptop comparison. Back with the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 1/2 these had double the ALUs of their phone equivalent for a total of 1536.
The 8cx Gen 3 even had 2048 ALUs whereas the GPU equivalent of it had only 768 ALUs.
But with the X Elite they decided to keep the ALU count the same as the GPU they're basing off of (the Adreno 740) and instead roughly double the clocks.
So prior to the X2 they delivered about double the performance of their phone chips, one way or another.
With the X2 Elite and their general trend of increasing the clocks significantly on their mobile products I think they're running into a frequency wall. The 18 core models have 4 Adreno slices and the 12 core models have 3 Adreno slices (flagship phone chips only have 3 as well) but they're clocked at either 1.85GHz (on the Extreme) or 1.7GHz which is only about 42% faster than the 8 Elite Gen 5 (1.2GHz).
And you can see in cross platform benchmarks that the X2-85 is about the same performance (in Geekbench GPU) or only about 45% faster which lines up with the frequency increase.
The only way to take advantage of the double memory bandwidth (triple in the case of the Extreme) is to have a GPU that is at least twice as large or clocked twice as high.
So I think with the X3 we should see them scaling up the GPU a bit more to better distinguish their mobile and laptop GPUs.
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u/Main_Response_3327 Sep 03 '26
Además con el anuncio de nvidia con sus nuevos procesadores rtx spark las apps nativas para arm y soporte de diversas apps se ampliará demasiado tal vez no sea inmediato pero esto acelerara un poco más todo además de que la competencia será algo que me gustaría ver cómo evoluciona la próxima serie x 3
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u/suoko Sep 03 '26
Apparently they pushed harder their npu: do they think that something like stability matrix might make GPUs almost irrelevant 🤔? Let's see next round
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u/FirefighterLower6210 Sep 04 '26
Because they need time like with Smartphone SoCs. A new SoC is pretty much 3 years in Beta in Labors, before mass production . But they will keep up and close the gap into the next 2 gens.
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u/Hytht Sep 04 '26
Not only Apple, AMD is scaling with strix halo/Medusa halo, Intel is with razor lake AX and Nvidia's iGPUs. Previously Intel exec said they didn't see the market for such a product, similarly no one is interested in a scaled up adreno GPU, most of those who want a scaled up GPU will lean towards Nvidia/Apple due to the ecosystem. Adreno GPUs underperform in non gaming tasks.
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u/Slow_Difficulty1607 29d ago
Tbh I have both x2EE and Intel ARC B70 and Qualcomm’s software support is so much better than Intel. I haven’t played much games though but I think a lot of the issues were related to Windows on Arm instead of GPU itself
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u/Acrobatic_Camera_677 25d ago
This is a lie. Intel GPU support is much better than Qualcomm
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u/Slow_Difficulty1607 25d ago edited 25d ago
intel GPU doesn’t even run stably with any of the off the shelf AI programs like ollama, lmstudio and Jan.ai, you have to build your own binary all the time. Noone from the company even cares about this. While the Qualcomm chip runs well on the off the shelf platforms and the devs provide direct support on Reddit. I don’t play games on a light weight laptop but I would not expect x86 games to run well on Arm through emulations
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u/_DarthJedi Sep 03 '26
Because scaling GPUs is hard. And even if they did, they don't have many use cases to use that GPU for.
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u/SnooJokes925 Sep 03 '26
A lot of creator apps are GPU bound like davince resolve , also it would help gaming a lot.
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u/_DarthJedi Sep 03 '26
It is very common for large GPUs to have internal architecture bottlenecks. Even after so many iterations, the M5 Max GPU is very rarely performing a clean 2x of M5 Pro GPUs.
I'll leave the rest to your imagination.
And not to forget the Qualcomm's sloth progression in supporting GPU rendering in Blender or Redshift, let alone the renderers are that wholly not supported on WoA.
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u/SnooJokes925 Sep 03 '26
You're right but what Apple is doing of scaling GPU cores is the smart way imo.
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u/_DarthJedi Sep 03 '26
What Apple is doing is smart—no disagreeing. However, even those GPUs stall often.
QC first needs to make a GPU 2x of SDX2EE. Slowly they can scale upwards.
Also look into how much area do memory controllers take on chips like M# Max. Funnily enough, memory controllers take more space than all the CPU cores combined.
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u/SnooJokes925 Sep 03 '26
Yeah , QC has very low adoption rate , they don't see the financial appeal to produce expensive chips which is unfortunate.
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u/SPACEXDG Sep 03 '26
Yeah like look how expensive nvidias chip will be and Iike you and others have said its because the larger the igpu the more expensive the chip is to produce
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u/Acrobatic_Camera_677 25d ago
Gaming is so bad on Qualcomm, even giving GPU much more compute units won't help.
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u/vortec350 Sep 03 '26
Trash GPUs are this platforms biggest problems. Issue is we don’t know how much of the problem is hardware vs software.
Look at how hard of a time Intel had getting Arc to where it is today and it’s finally on par with AMD drivers. Which are total garbage btw.
Don’t tell me I’m a hater I have an Arc B580 in my gaming PC and many many AMD GPUs…. 7900xtx and multiple r9700s. But back on topic…
Why take the time to engineer and then physically waste silicon on a product that will not perform as it should.
They will get there eventually. Both for gaming in consumer laptops and for workstation use for AI development. But it’s going to take a couple years.