Monday, January 23rd 2023
Qualcomm Allegedly Preparing a Rival to Apple M SoC, Codenamed Hamoa
Qualcomm has been working on its Snapdragon SoCs for quite some time now, with massive success in the mobile phone space. However, the company's processors needed to be up to the task regarding laptops. For a user to not look at x86 offerings, the only remaining performant alternatives are Apple's M processors. In 2021 Qualcomm purchased the Nuvia team that was developing massively efficient and high-performance IP for laptops, similar to Apple M processors. Today, according to the insights from Kuba Wojciechowski (@Za_Raczke) on Twitter, we have some potential information about the upcoming Nuvia-powered SoC codenamed Hamoa.
According to the Twitter thread, Qualcomm's Hamoa processors are part of the Snapdragon 8xc Gen 4 compute platform and feature up to eight high-performance P-cores and four low-power E-cores, all based on Nuvia's IP. Allegedly the P-cores are being tested at 3.4 GHz, while the E-cores are tested at 2.5 GHz. The SoC splits CPU cores into blocks, each being a four-core group with 12 MB of shared L2 cache. There is also an 8 MB L3 cache structure; it needs to be clarified whether it is per core block or for the entire SoC. The chip employs 12 MB of system-level cache, with 4 MB of memory for graphics-related tasks handled by iGPU. The iGPU of choice is Adreno 740, with all modern APIs supported. Discrete graphics solutions are supported by the top-end SKUs, which allow eight PCIe 4.0 lanes to be directed toward dGPU, along with an additional four PCIe 4.0 lanes for NVMe SSD. For RAM, the chip uses up to 64 GBs of LPDDR5X eight-channel memory with up to 4.2 GHz speeds. Chip's media engines are structured to support decoding up to 4K120 and encode up to 4K60 with AV1.
Source:
Kuba Wojciechowski (@Za_Raczke), Twitter
According to the Twitter thread, Qualcomm's Hamoa processors are part of the Snapdragon 8xc Gen 4 compute platform and feature up to eight high-performance P-cores and four low-power E-cores, all based on Nuvia's IP. Allegedly the P-cores are being tested at 3.4 GHz, while the E-cores are tested at 2.5 GHz. The SoC splits CPU cores into blocks, each being a four-core group with 12 MB of shared L2 cache. There is also an 8 MB L3 cache structure; it needs to be clarified whether it is per core block or for the entire SoC. The chip employs 12 MB of system-level cache, with 4 MB of memory for graphics-related tasks handled by iGPU. The iGPU of choice is Adreno 740, with all modern APIs supported. Discrete graphics solutions are supported by the top-end SKUs, which allow eight PCIe 4.0 lanes to be directed toward dGPU, along with an additional four PCIe 4.0 lanes for NVMe SSD. For RAM, the chip uses up to 64 GBs of LPDDR5X eight-channel memory with up to 4.2 GHz speeds. Chip's media engines are structured to support decoding up to 4K120 and encode up to 4K60 with AV1.
33 Comments on Qualcomm Allegedly Preparing a Rival to Apple M SoC, Codenamed Hamoa
Microsoft couldn't find their own arse last time they tried emulating x86 code on ARM. Let's hope they wake up before it's too late this time around...
Apple succeed first and foremost because of their OS and APIs, the Unix kernels supported ARM since forever and it was easy for most pro apps to migrate to M1 (nodejs, java, visual studio code, docker etc.) and for those who did not/could not, Rosetta stone 2 is an amazing API tbh, have 0 issues on my professional macbook, I waited until the 14" released for the softwares to catch up and frankly never looked back. For productivity a macbook M1/M2 is really a solid choice.
Snapdragon Hamoa may be an interesting ARM SoC, it will be severely restricted by the OS layer
Qualcomm might be successful if they concentrate purely on Chromebooks and Android tablets. Going after the traditional laptop space will be a hard sale.
AMD, Intel and Apple SoCs are very capable and compatible.
Most people don't need powerful hardware, they just browse the web, consume media with basic word and Excel stuff, just make the CPUs cheap with huge battery life.
Without apple's software support the M1 would suck hard. We saw it with non M1 optimized apps when it launched, anything apple didnt tweak performed very poorly. Which no duh, you can hyper optimize anything for a specific chip/arch and get better performance, see also how game consoles worked for over 20 years. Any PC based chip is going to be handicapped by needing to support a wide band of software, on a wide band of systems, with multiple manufacturers and an OS that was built around x86.
This is the benefit of x86, it is a very flexible arch, and the cthulu - tier labyrinth of instructions can support a lot of varied operations to overcome the lack of vertical integration in the PC space. ARM, not so much.
As for the emulation of x86, it should be resolved by now (i don't mean it is, but this is a resolved problem). All apps from the Microsoft Store should provide ARM binary (if it's not already the case). For the non-store apps. Microsoft could implement a recompiler that would just create an ARM executable at first launch or in background so the application could just run native without having to do Just in Time emulation.
From my understanding, this is mostly what Apple did for M1 and it was fine. Those laptop with this kind of emulation would be good enough for the vast majority of users. For games, i do not think it will be good enough even with an external GPU but we never know.
The main challenge will be the cost. They will need to produce higher performing laptop at cheaper cost or else, why anybody would care?
But a cheaper laptop with good battery life could have a good success.
I’m glad snapdragon is trying new stuff. But i doubt they will be successful. They are targeting the economy section of the market. And there’s not much profit down there and therefore not much margin to reinvest in R&D to stay ahead.
They ‘ll come up with a working third rate performer, and then slowly fall further and further behind. And the team will move on again.
Most folks usually swoon over Qualcomm (especially sat beside MediaTek and Samsung's Exynos).
That said, I could see a few 'non-performance-related' reasons why one might 'not like' the whole 'mobile SoC marketplace'. Ex: Most Qualcomm-based smartphones are extremely 'locked down'.
Regardless, I'm not sure whole else is making high performance ARM SoCs (for consumer applications) anymore, since nVidia is basically 'out' sans Nintendo Switch.
edit: I'm really surprised I didn't see any 'childish play' with the Codename.
Here, I'll start:
"I sure hope they don't "Ham" this up!
"AMD Genoa, meet QC Hamoa; we're 2/3 the way to a Charcuterie!"
And the answer to the question why?, is mostly: compilers. Compilers back then weren't as smart as they are today when you compile to some IR and then you take that and translate to whatever executable code you need. And we didn't have such smart compilers in part because CPUs weren't powerful enough.
To bad Apple has it's head up it's arse and doesn't just license their SoC to anyone. Revenue is revenue. This makes a strong case to separate the chip design group form the retail group, like Sony has done with their sensor division. Sony sell cameras sensors to whoever wants to buy them, including arch rivals like Nikon and Canon.