Huawei’s GPU Turbo: Valid Technology with Overzealous Marketing
by Ian Cutress & Andrei Frumusanu on September 4, 2018 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Huawei
- Mobile
- Benchmarks
- honor
- Neural Networks
- Kirin 970
- AI
The Difficulty in Analyzing GPU Turbo
I still haven’t managed to get two identical devices with and without GPU Turbo. The closest practical comparison I was able to make is between the Huawei P20 and the Honor Play. These are two devices that use the same SoC and memory, albeit in different chassis.
The differences between the two phones are not just the GPU Turbo introduction, but the Honor Play also includes a newer Arm Bifrost driver, r12p0, while the P20 had the r9p0 release. Unfortunately no mobile vendor publishes driver release notes, so we can’t differentiate between possible improvements on the GPU driver side, and actual improvements that GPU Turbo makes.
Huawei P20 (no GPU Turbo)
Honor Play (GPU Turbo)
For raw frame rate numbers, it was extremely hard to tell the two phones apart. PUBG tops out at 40 FPS as well, although it should be noted that we could have invested a lot more time inspecting jitter and just how noticeable that would be in practice, but one thing that can be very empirically be measured is power consumption.
Here the Honor Play seemingly did have an advantage, coming in at ~3.9W while rendering the above scene. This was a tad less than the P20’s ~4.7W. These figures are total device power, and obviously the screen and rest of device components will be different between the two models. It does however represent a 15% difference in power, although to be clear we can't rule out the possibility that they could be different bins; i.e. they have different power/voltage characteristics as per random manufacturing variance, which is common in the space.
Huawei has quoted data for the Kirin 980:
Still, it does very much look like GPU Turbo has an efficiency advantage, however again a 10% figure as presented during the Kirin 980 keynote seems to be a lot closer to reality than the promised 30% marketing materials.
GPU Turbo Is Real, Just Be Wary of Marketing Numbers
One thing that should not be misunderstood in this article is that GPU Turbo itself is not just a marketing ploy, but rather a very real and innovative solution that tries to address the weaknesses of the current generation Kirin chipsets. Kirin still sits well behind both the performance and efficiency of Snapdragon-based Adreno graphics, and because Huawei cannot license Adreno, it has to try and make the best of what it has, aside from dedicating more die space to their GPUs.
However much of the technical merit of GPU Turbo has been largely overshadowed by quite overzealous marketing claims that are nothing short of misleading. More on this on the next page.
By nature of it being a software solution, it is something that augments the hardware, and if the hardware can’t deliver, then so won’t the software. Here a lot of the confusion and misleading material can be directly attributed to the way the Honor Play was presented to the public. Reality is, even with GPU Turbo, the Honor Play is still not competitive with Snapdragon 845 devices, even when it wants to portray itself as such. Here, the differences in the silicon are just too great to be overcome by a software optimization, not matter how innovative the new mechanism is.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
64 Comments
View All Comments
dave_the_nerd - Tuesday, September 4, 2018 - link
Honor 7x? How about the Mate SE, its Huawei twin? (We have one...)mode_13h - Tuesday, September 4, 2018 - link
> There is no silver bullet here – while an ideal goal would be a single optimized network to deal with every game in the market, we have to rely on default mechanisms to get the job done.Why not use distributed training across a sampling of players (maybe the first to download each new game or patch) and submit their performance data to a cloud-based training service? The trained models could then be redistributed and potentially further refined.
tygrus - Tuesday, September 4, 2018 - link
The benefits seem <10% and don't beat the competition (eg. Samsung S8 to S9 models).Why 7 pages when it could have been done in 3 or 4 pages. The article needed more effort to edit and remove the repetition & fluff before publishing. Maybe I'm having a bad day but it just seemed harder to read than your usual.
LiverpoolFC5903 - Wednesday, September 5, 2018 - link
That is the whole point of the article, to go into depth. If you dont like technical 'fluff', there are hundreds of sites out there with one pagers more to your liking. .zodiacfml - Wednesday, September 5, 2018 - link
I guess, I im not wrong when I first of heard this. I was thinking "dynamic resolution" or image quality reducing feature that works on the fly.s.yu - Friday, September 7, 2018 - link
Technically Huawei isn't directly responsible, you know the article said that all Mali devices run on lower settings.The thing you didn't anticipate is that they were citing numbers compared to Kirin 960, that threw everyone off. Seeing as they're Huawei I knew they were lying somehow, but seeing how Intel put their cross-generation comparisons in big bold print for so long I didn't realize somebody could hide such a fact in small print, or even omit that in most presentations.
Manch - Wednesday, September 5, 2018 - link
<quote> (Ed: We used to see this a lot in the PC space over 10 years ago, where different GPUs would render different paths or have ‘tricks’ to reduce the workload. They don’t anymore.) </quote>How does this not happen anymore? Both Nvidia & AMD create game ready drivers to optimize for diff games. AMD does tend to optimize for Mantle/Vulkan moreso than DX12(Explain SB AMD...WTF?). Regardless these optimizations are meant to extract the best performance per game. Part of that is reducing workload per frame to increase overall FPS, so I don't see how this does not happen anymore.
Ian Cutress - Wednesday, September 5, 2018 - link
Thus comment was more about the days where 'driver optimizations' meant trading off quality for performance, and vendors were literally reducing the level of detail to get better performance. Back in the day we had to rename Quake3 to Quack3 to show the very visible differences that these 'optimizations' had on gameplay.Manch - Wednesday, September 5, 2018 - link
Ah OK, makes sense. I do remember those shenanigans.ThanksManch - Wednesday, September 5, 2018 - link
oops, messed up the quotes....no coffee :/