Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Qualcomm Says New Snapdragon 8 Elite SoC Has 'World's Fastest Mobile CPU'
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
For years, Apple fanatics claimed that Apple workers were so smart for “designing” chips that were more efficient than competitors.
Anyone who understands semiconductors knew it was all BS and that Apple was only ahead due to strong-arming suppliers into giving Apple first dips on the latest technology. It’s not engineering that Apple is good at (They typically suck at it); it was sales volume and marketing. However, suppliers are growing wary of Apple’s predatory ways and are less willing to give them such favorable deals. That’s why TSMC gave QC the same node + improvements in only a few months after Apple. Now the myth of Apple “designing” is crumbling and Apple fanatics are damage controlling. Sad.
Anyone who understands semiconductors knew it was all BS and that Apple was only ahead due to strong-arming suppliers into giving Apple first dips on the latest technology. It’s not engineering that Apple is good at (They typically suck at it); it was sales volume and marketing. However, suppliers are growing wary of Apple’s predatory ways and are less willing to give them such favorable deals. That’s why TSMC gave QC the same node + improvements in only a few months after Apple. Now the myth of Apple “designing” is crumbling and Apple fanatics are damage controlling. Sad.
Qualcomm is not a mobile phone manufacturer but a chip maker there is a difference. These chips go in random phones before they get put into proper flagship android devices. There is a difference but Apple overstate the performance of their mobile chips
I feel like there is a miscommunication here.
It might be easier if you think of it like designing a pizza. Apple has beautiful thin, fresh dough which cooks rapidly = faster more efficient CPU. Qualcomm has thick old, low quality dough kneaded by a man with only one arm = less efficient and slower. The oven (TSMC) is the same oven, so it doesn’t matter much.
Hope that helps. Take your time to digest it when you get out of work
But they are not lying when they say it’s a faster chip. Plus Apple overstates how powerful their mobile chips are
That doesn’t make any sense?
The Qualcomm chip doesn’t stop you from getting the new android software features but Apple’s cutting edge chip does
The fab engineers the ingredients and the process. The designer only picks simple things like the size and toppings and has to follow the fab’s design language.
A more apt comparison is that the fab has plenty of doughs to pick from. Apple and QC only pick which dough they want, but they don’t engineer the dough. Chip designing is more of an economics and financial problem than an engineering one. You’re essentially just pick components that other people engineered but you have no understanding of how the component is made or how it works. You only know the performance profile and the cost. How it works is a mystery to you.
What? That doesn’t make any sense. Why would you ding Apple for not providing Android features, but not ding Qualcomm for not providing Apple features.
Also what does that have to do with pizzas?
WRONG!!!!!!!
Everybody knows the fab is the oven. The chip is the dough and ingredients made by the engineers. Hence why Apple outperforms the others in performance and efficiency.
You edited your post afterwards. None of it was accurate.
Bro… do you even make pizza?? And do Dominos know about your lack of knowledge?
Last edited:
The fab is the oven AND the dough and the ingredients engineer. The chip designer is the 8-year-old ordering a pizza through dominos.com.
Also, the performance and efficiency is inferior.
WRONG AGAIN. One graph concerning multi core does not counteract the multitude of Single Core (the only one that matters) showing Apple Silicon is more performant and efficient.
I would never let you near my dough.
Have you ever done any manufacturing overseas? If so, you'd know the difference between an OEM and an ODM, which seems to be the misunderstanding you're displaying.
The 8YO can change the size of his pizza like Apple does with core size. Bigger cores = more transistors, but you have less room to add more cores. It’s a simple design choice like ordering small vs large pizza.
Semiconductor fabrication is a different ballgame because of how precise it is. It doesn’t make sense to have the designer engineer the components of the fab since that would crumble yields with no context of how the output of each part interplays with the whole process.
For semiconductors, the foundry does most of the engineering work and gives chip designers a catalog of what can be changed to adhere to the fab’s design rules. Playing around with the fab’s catalog is intellectually child’s plays
I feel like you're not seeing the bigger picture here. If that were the case, why would Apple, QC, et. al need to license the ARM architecture? Surely only TSMC would need a license, since they're doing all the design work.
Tim of all people would be opposed to spending that kind of money on a license he apparently doesn't need.
True, but unfortunately. As we all know the Microsoft story. It doesn't matter. Just has to be close enough, and cheaper.
What I find so strange, is that while Apple got enormous praise for the M1 (deservedly). The PC side will not care so long as they have something close enough to it. Even though the SXE will most likely produce more heat, and need more energy and will not match PPW (performance per watt). It's close enough. And because you can't easily run Windows on a Mac, like we used to with Bootcamp. The price difference is such that it's going to be easier for PC folks to stay on PC or move back to it after getting a MacBook.
If Apple can grab more market share from Windows ARM (specifically). Based off of applications that fully support M chips. Then they can keep a lead. But, either AMD or Nvidia will eventually create a GPU to support WinARM or Qualcomm will get good enough iGPU on the SoC to again, not matter to the broader public.
Apple is doing it right, but someone has to compete with them and will do it another way. For now it's more brute force from Qualcomm and creative designs by intel (not really, but for them it is). I'm waiting for AMD or intel to switch or "add" ARM to their designs. And relegate x86 code as a depreciating feature of the chip. Fully backwards compatible etc. But, eventually it goes away.
Yes they do. Qualcomm Oryon and Apple's Avalanche, etc. are custom designs. They license the ARM ISA, not the ARM Cortex designs; the actual internal layout of the CPU cores is different from ARM Cortex. And Cortex, by comparison, is a lot less efficient.
(A lot of Qualcomm SoCs do use Cortex, but the "Elite" chips do not.)
The idea that people like Johny Srouji and Manu Gulati "have no understanding" is pretty funny.
This is such a bloated statement. The amount of overhead needed for a chip manufactured for use on an android system is different then Apple silicon. Like others have said competition is good as the consumer should be the winner. In the end I think all the chips should be good enough to handle the daily task of a smartphone user.
No what I’m getting at is if your saying that apples chip are so light & excellent then why can’t a world beating apple chip support full software support for longer than 2 years.
Where as a bloated old Qualcomm chip offers full android support longer
Apple is doing more demanding things on device, whereas Android does more of these things in the cloud.
In any case you don’t determine the performance of a chip by the software features that run on it. You use test and measurements using benchmarks or preferably real world software.
According to the video, Xiaomei has already delivered a product phone to them for review. But it was under embargo and results would be published after the embargo is lifted.
All lies. Just like every other thing posted by this person today and yesterday on this thread. Seriously, not one significant idea expressed has any truth to it. Hopefully nobody is taken in by this nonsense.
This is his only response to me:
Uhuh. Sure. He's written six other things since then.
If you're considering a standard cell library, then you'll find the largers designers tend to work with the fabs on these things. They also work on the tooling and design verification and validation stuff together.
Unless you're tail end process scum at which point it's tough poopy.
Extremist views annoy me. Rarely is anything as black and white as you’re saying.
The new 1+ 13 with Snapdragon 8 elite looks good. But just as @steve09090 mentioned above, it's not all black and white.
From the new video from Geekerwan, the power efficiency of the qualcomm chip is about the same as A16 Pro for spec 2017 integer tests. Lower than A17 Pro and A18 Pro.
But its floating point efficiency looks better, but still below A18 Pro.
But its geekbench 6 efficiency looks on-par with A18 Pro, same as previous video with an engineering sample.
From the new video from Geekerwan, the power efficiency of the qualcomm chip is about the same as A16 Pro for spec 2017 integer tests. Lower than A17 Pro and A18 Pro.
But its floating point efficiency looks better, but still below A18 Pro.
But its geekbench 6 efficiency looks on-par with A18 Pro, same as previous video with an engineering sample.