Snapdragon 800 (MSM8974) Performance Preview: Qualcomm Mobile Development Tablet Tested
by Brian Klug on June 18, 2013 8:00 PM ESTBasemark X
Basemark X is a new addition to our mobile GPU benchmark suite. There are no low level tests here, just some game simulation tests run at both onscreen (device resolution) and offscreen (1080p, no vsync) settings. The scene complexity is far closer to GLBenchmark 2.7 than the new 3DMark Ice Storm benchmark, so frame rates are pretty low:
Once again we see absolutely tremendous increases in performance if we look at Basemark X. Adreno 330 improves performance over Adreno 320 by 95%, the advantage over PowerVR SGX 544MP3 is also quite impressive. Snapdragon 800 also holds a 41% performance advantage over Apple's A6X in the iPad 4 (PowerVR SGX 554M4).
Epic Citadel
Epic's Citadel benchmark gives us a good indication of lighter workload, v-sync limited performance at native resolution. At 1080p, the Snapdragon 800 MDP/T offers over 50% better performance than the Snapdragon 600 based platforms. Granted we're comparing to smartphones here so there's some thermal advantage playing to the 800's favor.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
115 Comments
View All Comments
althaz - Tuesday, June 18, 2013 - link
*Their*I'm not sure you could call them the Intel of Mobile. There's a couple of key differences - the first and most obvious being that Intel is leading in x86 IPC, power management and, this is the big difference, manufacturing. Intel won't and can't go away because they have a tangible advantage over their competitors that will require incredible investment to overcome.
The other is that Qualcomm have a large slice of an ever-increasing pie, but Intel have basically the whole x86 cake to themselves, with the crumbs falling to AMD.
It's probably also worth mentioning that Qualcomm seem better at producing the right improvements for consumers, wheras Intel were late to the low-power party and slow to get going on graphics to (although both are clear foci of the company now).
Interestingly, I believe Qualcomm's mobile division is basically AMD/ATI's old mobile division, which they didn't think was worth it to keep. That's looking a like a pretty huge mistake right now.
tuxRoller - Wednesday, June 19, 2013 - link
Thanks for the grammar correction, teach. Now that I know it any way you can teach it to my phones keyboard? Grammar is useful for helping to avoid ambiguity but the previous could only be understood one way. IOW, your correction wasn't needed unless you were just being anal.You make some good points and it's clear that not clear what it means when someone says "X is the Intel of Y". Intel using their fab is certainly a part of their success. That they are THE key x86 player is, I think, the more important touchstone. It was that which I was speaking of when I spoke of them. I THINK they are, by far, the biggest, most profitable supplier of ARM based SoC in the world. Samsung is huge but they consume what they make. TI is leaving the mobile field and haven't had a major design win for awhile.
BTW you're right about ATI and adreno but the 300+ series is vastly different from the architectures Qualcomm inherited from ATI.
FwFred - Tuesday, June 18, 2013 - link
Very inconclusive without any power measurements. In its tablet reference form factor certainly beats modern SoCs in phone form factors. I'd like to see it against Tegra 4, Bay Trail, and Haswell (4.5W SDP) in a tablet form factor.grahaman27 - Tuesday, June 18, 2013 - link
I second that.aryonoco - Wednesday, June 19, 2013 - link
I agree, I want to see it next to Tegra 4, Bay Trail, and also Kabini and Temash.But I have to say, it looks good, really good. Especially that GPU.
To think that Adreno was AMD/ATI's embedded graphics division that AMD didn't think was worth anything and sold for peanuts (something like $30M IIRC) to Qualcomm. Dirk Meyer really ruined that company.
FwFred - Wednesday, June 19, 2013 - link
Doh, totally forgot about Temash. I was trying to think of all the fanless tablet SoCs coming out.wsw1982 - Thursday, June 20, 2013 - link
The engadget has the benchmark for snapdragon on phone and tablet. It can be seen that the snapdragon 800 is very fast in tablet setup, but only little bit faster than snapdragon 600 in phone setup. I guess this partly answered your TDP concern.http://www.engadget.com/2013/06/18/qualcomm-snapdr...
iwod - Tuesday, June 18, 2013 - link
I Love the Equalizer Part. Finally we have some sense of how far we are from Mainstream Desktop Performance. Would be great if Haswell were added to the Chart, and a UL Haswell running at similar Power usage in there as well. ( Although i believe Intel would properly pressure Anand not to have done so )Impulses - Wednesday, June 19, 2013 - link
Can't believe how far behind Atom's GPU is at this point and how long Intel sandbagged the market with it...I've been rather disconnected from the Android news/rumor mill, any chance Snapdragon makes it into the next small Nexus tablet design? I really wanna downsize/upgrade from my OG Transformer...
Impulses - Wednesday, June 19, 2013 - link
Meant Snapdragon 800, obviously.