The Snapdragon X Elite’s Adreno iGPU

Qualcomm, a well-known player in the integrated graphics space, has been refining its Adreno GPU line across multiple generations of Snapdragon SoCs for cell phones. However, Qualcomm’s ambitions extend beyond the cell phone market. With the Snapdragon X Elite, they’re targeting the laptop market, and their Adreno GPU is along for the ride.

Adreno X1: A New Naming Convention

Officially referred to as the Adreno X1, this GPU breaks away from the previous Adreno nxx naming convention. In the past, ‘n’ represented the architecture generation, and larger values of ‘xx’ indicated larger implementations within that generation. The Snapdragon X Elite’s iGPU, labeled Adreno 741 internally, appears to be a scaled-out version of the Adreno 730 found in the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 cell phone chip.

Performance Comparison

To assess the Adreno X1’s capabilities, we compared it with Intel’s Xe-LPG iGPU in Meteor Lake and AMD’s RDNA 3 iGPU in Phoenix. Here are some key points:

• Clock Speeds: Adreno X1 can clock up to 1.5 GHz in the highest-end Snapdragon X Elite SKUs, although the SKU we tested restricts it to 1.25 GHz. Still, this is significantly higher than the 900 MHz of the Adreno 730 in the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1.
• Cache Hierarchy: Intel’s Meteor Lake iGPU has a simpler two-level cache hierarchy but offers more cache capacity at each level. Adreno X1, on the other hand, is wider, with 1536 FP32 units. Meteor Lake’s 1024 FP32 units clock 50% higher, resulting in similar theoretical FP32 throughput.

Benchmarks

Geekerwan conducted benchmarks comparing the Adreno iGPU of the Snapdragon X Elite with contemporary 15 W to 28 W class SoCs across Arm and x64 architectures, as well as a discrete NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 Laptop GPU. Additionally, Qualcomm’s performance metrics indicate that the Adreno X1 matches the performance of AMD’s Radeon 780M in both 28W and 80W variants and nearly doubles the M2 chip in Cinebench 2024 (Multi-Threaded).

In summary, Qualcomm’s Adreno X1 aims to tackle demanding PC games by scaling out their Adreno 7xx architecture and pushing clock speeds higher. As laptops continue to evolve, it’s exciting to see how this GPU performs in real-world scenarios.