Just for the fun of it, looked up specs for the GPUs in these SOCs as well as the two desktop GPUs (both at 40nm from 2011) you pointed out. They do match up will enough and are all in the same performance range
Desktop GPUs:
- HD6570 - 480:24:8 @ 650MHz doing 624 GFLOPS
- GT545 - 144:24:16 @ 870/1740Mhz doing 500 GFLOPS
Mobile GPUs:
- Kirin 970: Mali-G72 MP12 - 384:12:12 @ 746MHz doing 573 GFLOPs
- Exynos 9810: Mali-G72 MP18 - 576:18:18 @ 572MHz doing 659 GFLOPs
- Snapdragon 845: Adreno 630 - 256:24:16 @ 710MHz doing 727 GFLOPs
For comparison, lets add current Intel's main iGPU:
- HD/UHD 630 (GT2) - 192:16:8 @1200MHz doing 460 GFLOPs
Edit:
As far as transistor counts go:
HD6570 is Turks and 716 million transistors.
GT545 is cut down (25% of chip disabled) GF116 and 1170 million transistors.
Apple is the current leader in this space, no one comes close (except in a handful of tasks) in their TDP range, not even the best of Intel.
Are we counting the total number of transistors on the SoC, if so then it's truly not an apples vs apples comparison. For instance we don't know how much space or transistors are dedicated for DSP, modem, GPU, AI et al.
Yup. Intel and AMD architectures simply does not scale that low. Similarly, ARM or A11 does not scale much higher.
DSPs are large, modems should not be too large. There is quite a lot of extra stuff on the chip for sure. AI is marketing term, probably for GPU.
Looking at the specs above, all these GPUs (as well ass Apple's in A11) are roughly billion transistors if not less. DSP is probably in the same range. I would expect the CPU cores to be roughly billion transistors, maybe a bit more for 8-core SOCs.
Transistor counts are a tricky thing. Not that SOC manufacturers are eager to disclose details but A11 is 4.3 billion, Kirin 970 is reportedly 5.5 billion, Snapdragon 845 is larger than 835 (3 billion), Exynos 9810 is unknown. Transistors and die size are related but not directly or linearly. Google gave this image for relative die sizes of Snapdragon 845, A11, and Exynos 9810:
(Kirin 970 is 96.72 mm²).
Edit2:
Apple had some images in their A11 presentation highlighting separate parts of the SOC.
Based on images from presentation as well as the die picture linked above (where not all parts of GPU and CPU are highlighted) and assuming transistor density is roughly equal in A11 SOC (which it likely is), this is what the transistor counts of areas should be:
- CPU cores ~1 billion
- GPU ~0.85 billion
- ISP ~0.75 billion