How did the two Wang Bombing platforms enter into Xiaolong PC to overturn the traditional PC industry pattern?

At present, the traditional PC industry is undergoing unprecedented changes, and the root of this huge change lies in AIGC.

At present, AI application innovation is still in its early stage, but the excellent and diversified computing capabilities of PC have begun to show its strength. CPU, GPU and NPU computing units can independently or cooperatively complete different types of AI computing tasks; The mature system ecology of Windows will smooth the application threshold. These unique advantages make PC the best carrier for AIGC localization. Because of this, the traditional PC industry, which is hungry for innovation, quickly seized the opportunity of AIGC. To the best of our knowledge, Intel Core Ultra, AMD Reelong, and Qualcomm X series, which have not yet been officially launched, have all been born for this purpose, and they have become the starting point and drive The.

·Qualcomm Snapdragon X is an important innovation driver in the era of traditional PC industry transformation

However, while the traditional PC industry has undergone tremendous changes, it also faces some practical problems. For example, the problem of energy efficiency ratio caused by the process approaching the nanometer limit; The traditional PC industry pattern has remained unchanged for many years, resulting in product solidification problems; And the lack of innovation of x86 architecture platform. Therefore, while grasping the innovation lifeline of AIGC, the traditional PC industry certainly needs a new ecosystem like Snapdragon X. The benign competition between multiple platforms will undoubtedly accelerate the PC industry into a new round of innovation.

Eight years ago, Xiaolong 820 carved a crack in the stable traditional PC industry "Dragon X Elite" And those just released "Snapdragon X Plus" , which is likely to be the shock wave that will set off a storm in the traditional PC industry in the next few years.

Looking back in the past, Qualcomm's determination to enter the PC field was just like that of competitors who were crazy about entering the smartphone industry. The former Snapdragon 820 was a flash in the pan in the PC field, but today's Snapdragon X is different. Advanced manufacturing process Blessing, ARM architecture The natural energy efficiency ratio, the first NPU computing module to achieve 45TOPS computing power, and the outstanding GPU graphics performance, connectivity, and scalability will become the core driving force of the innovation wave in the AI PC era.

·Energy efficiency ratio and extended endurance directly hit the core pain points of existing PC hardware

Actually, in April association In his keynote speech at the Innovation Technology Conference, Qualcomm CEO Ammon gave his views on the development trend of AIGC, smart terminal and PC industry. Ammon said, "We have witnessed that the innovation and application of generative AI are developing at an unprecedented speed, but even so, we are still in the early stage. So far, most of the development work of generative AI is focused on the cloud, and the cloud will continue to play an indispensable role. But generative AI is evolving rapidly and will run directly on terminal devices, from smart phones to next-generation PCs, and eventually into more terminals such as cars. "

Yes, Qualcomm's Snapdragon X series is one of the core hardware platforms of "generative AI runs directly on terminal devices".

In October last year, Qualcomm launched the Snapdragon X Elite high-performance PC platform at the Snapdragon Summit. In April this year, Qualcomm announced the new member of the Snapdragon X family, Snapdragon X Plus. What are their strengths? Let's take a look at the hardware parameters and performance first.

first, Dragon X Elite Adopted 4nm Made by process technology, with 12 high-performance cores , integrated Adreno GPU Supports 4.6 trillion floating point operations per second, with the main frequency up to 3.8GHz , and also supports Dual core enhancement , up to 4.3GHz , which is also the first ARM architecture CPU core above 4GHz. In addition, it has up to 42MB total cache Capacity, Memory bandwidth 136GB/s , and support Eight channel LPDDR5x , its integrated Qualcomm Hexagon NPU With up to 45TOPS The powerful computing power of.

Like Snapdragon X Elite, Snapdragon X Plus Advanced 4nm The manufacturing process is built, in which Qualcomm Oryon CPU has 10 customized high-performance cores , the highest frequency is 3.4GHz ， Total cache capacity 42MB 。 support LPDDR5x memory , its integrated Adreno GPU calculation force is 3.8TFLOPS , Integration NPU calculation force Equally 45TOPS 。 Thanks to its compact size and excellent energy efficiency ratio, Snapdragon X Plus supports various product designs.

In terms of performance, the Snapdragon X series is also worth looking forward to.

In terms of Geekbench 6.2 CPU multithreading performance, the Qualcomm Oryon CPU integrated with Snapdragon X Plus is 10% faster than the Apple M3 processor, and the multithreading performance score reaches 13350. Under the same test, the Snapdragon X Elite is 28% faster than the Apple M3 processor. At the same time, it can be seen from the performance that the Snapdragon X Plus is one gear lower than the Snapdragon X Elite, but its performance has exceeded Apple's latest M3 processor.

Compared with Intel and AMD, Snapdragon X Elite and Snapdragon X Plus perform better in energy efficiency ratio.

First, referring to the single thread test data of Core Ultra 7 155H and Reeve 9 7940HS platform on Geekbench 6, the power consumption of Snapdragon X Elite when reaching the same peak performance is 65% lower, only 1/3 of Core Ultra 7 155H. Under the same power consumption, the CPU performance of Snapdragon X Elite is 54% higher and the energy efficiency ratio is excellent.

When compared with the more high-end Intel Core Ultra 9 185H, the Geekbench 6 single thread test of Snapdragon X Plus achieves the same peak performance with 65% lower power consumption; Under the same power consumption, the performance leads by up to 51%.

In the Geekbench 6 multithreading test standard, compared with Intel Core Ultra 7 155H, Snapdragon X Elite achieves the same peak performance with 60% lower power consumption; Under the same power consumption, the CPU performance of Snapdragon X Elite is 52% ahead.

Compared with the more high-end Core Ultra 9 185H, Snapdragon X Elite's Geekbench 6 multi-threaded test shows that the power consumption is 58% lower when reaching the same peak performance; The performance is 41% higher under the same power consumption.

The Snapdragon X Plus with a specification slightly lower than the Snapdragon X Elite also performs well. With reference to the Geekbench multi-threaded test data of Core Ultra 7 155H and Reelon 9 7940HS, the performance of Snapdragon X Plus is 37% ahead under the same power consumption; When reaching the same peak performance, the power consumption is 54% lower, and the energy efficiency ratio is also excellent.

Under the latest CINEBENCH 2024 multithreading test standard, the CPU performance of Snapdragon X Plus is 28% ahead of that of Core Ultra 7 155H and Reelung 9 7940HS under the same power consumption, and the power consumption is 39% lower when reaching the same peak performance, again demonstrating the advantage of energy efficiency ratio.

In addition to the excellent CPU single thread and multi-threaded performance, the graphics performance of Snapdragon X series GPUs is also worth looking forward to. 3DMark In the WildLife Extreme test mode, referring to the test results of the Core Ultra 7 155H integrated sharp Xe core display, the power consumption of Snapdragon X Elite and Snapdragon X Plus GPUs is only half of that of competitors when reaching the same peak performance; The performance leads by 36% under the same power consumption.

Like Snapdragon X Elite, Snapdragon X Plus integrates 45TOPS computing power. At present, the world's fastest NPU computing unit Software All kinds of AI applications, such as development programming, image quality enhancement, AI filter, AI noise reduction, have good efficiency performance. This also enables the Snapdragon X platform to support the large language model with a parameter scale of 7 billion to run at the terminal side at the speed of 30 tokens/s.

In addition, Snapdragon X series has excellent graphics processor capability, which can support external three screen ultra-high definition 4K 60Hz display and HDR10. In connection, it supports Wi Fi 7 wireless network, Sub-6GHz and 5G connection with maximum speed of 10GB/s for millimeter wave. In terms of image, it supports 18 bit dual ISP and MIPI cameras, which can bring advanced image and video functions to related devices. In terms of audio, Snapdragon Sound Snapdragon listening technology features are supported, including high-quality audio transmission of Bluetooth 5.4 protocol.

At present, the problems of existing PC hardware mainly include two aspects:

First, the energy efficiency ratio is not high enough. High power consumption and high temperature, but the performance level did not meet expectations, especially the CPU performance.

Second, Windows under x86 architecture notebook A little anxious in terms of endurance.

The core features of Snapdragon X platform are aimed at these two pain points. We can analyze from the official data released by Qualcomm that Snapdragon X Elite and Snapdragon X Plus have lower power consumption when reaching the same performance, which means that its energy efficiency advantage is high enough. Will the energy efficiency ratio translate into better endurance? Yes, this is actually the advantage of ARM architecture.

With the more powerful Snapdragon X Elite platform as a reference Office 365 applications, local Video playback , web browsing, YouTube streaming, and Teams video calling, its battery life is at least 40% longer than that of competing products, and the maximum is more than twice.

In fact, good performance can also be more obvious in practical applications. For example, when we explore the response speed of the Snapdragon X series platform, we will find all kinds of mainstream Application software , such as Adobe Photoshop 、Teams、 Steam 、 WinRAR 、 Firefox We can respond and open applications more quickly, at least 7% faster than competing products, and at most nearly 70% faster.

In addition, users are more concerned about the compatibility and application ecology of the Snapdragon platform. After all, Snapdragon PC suffered from this before. At present, Qualcomm has cooperated with many mainstream ISVs to ensure that various common applications can achieve better compatibility on the Snapdragon platform. The following figure basically illustrates the problem.

After getting through in terms of performance, energy efficiency ratio, endurance, response speed and application ecology, Qualcomm is actually ready to "re-enter" the PC industry with the Snapdragon X series. In the face of AI PC era and generative AI application innovation, can Snapdragon X series benefit thousands of industries?

·Promote the development of hybrid AI and provide excellent development environment for developers

As mentioned above, although Qualcomm is not the first time to try to enter the traditional PC industry, strictly speaking, previous attempts have not allowed Qualcomm to establish a sufficiently complete software and hardware ecosystem in the PC industry, which means that the new Snapdragon X series still needs to face up to the ecology, create the ecology, and build the ecology. Especially in the era of AI PC, where more emphasis is placed on applications, how to promote the landing of AI innovative applications through ecological forces, or how to make AI applications run on the Snapdragon X series platform truly and efficiently, and give full play to the hybrid AI computing power corresponding to CPU, GPU and NPU, must be the most realistic problem for Qualcomm.

In addition, Qualcomm CEO Ammon believes that hybrid AI is the future of AI. "Hybrid AI can simultaneously use AI on the terminal side and on the cloud side to distribute and coordinate workloads through high-performance connections, thus bringing a more intelligent personalized user experience. When the cloud side and the terminal use the same generative AI model, the terminal can bring the first mover advantage to the cloud side. Terminal side data can also improve the accuracy of AI applications, because it now has the user's situational information. ”An Meng said, "In order to meet these experience needs centered on generative AI, industry-leading connectivity and high-performance low-power computing are more important than ever before. Because of this, our terminal AI has unparalleled performance and energy efficiency, enabling generative AI to be ubiquitous, so as to achieve enhanced response speed, accuracy, reliability and privacy. Snapdragon X Elite is a leading platform for terminal side and hybrid AI. With the computing power up to 45 TOPS, it brings the fastest NPU in the world to PCs. In addition, it has industry-leading energy efficiency and endurance. Therefore, both consumers and enterprise users can use AI enhanced terminal side tools to improve productivity, creativity and collaboration ability around the clock. "

So, how does Qualcomm do in terms of ecological construction for hybrid AI applications?

First of all, there is no need to repeat it. It is to lay the hardware foundation for hybrid AI computing through Snapdragon X Elite, Snapdragon X Plus and other hardware with hybrid AI computing capabilities and strong AI computing power. At the same time, it can help Lenovo and other partners to build multi-modal, multi platform terminal devices based on Snapdragon X series.

Secondly, [Note that the "second" here only refers to the order, not the primary and secondary] Qualcomm passed the 「AI Stack」 as well as 「AI Hub」 These developer oriented projects reduce the threshold for AI application development and AI model optimization of Qualcomm hardware platform. This can stimulate the enthusiasm of developers and save costs for developers.

AI Stack is an AI software stack provided by Qualcomm for developers , aimed at enabling developers to accelerate generative AI applications. It focuses on achieving convenient development and deployment on billions of terminal devices equipped with Qualcomm and Snapdragon platforms worldwide, enabling developers. Developers can create, optimize, and deploy AI applications on Qualcomm hardware. One write can enable deployment of Qualcomm chipset solutions in different products and segments, greatly reducing development costs.

The AI Hub is a pre optimized AI model library provided by Qualcomm for developers , supports seamless deployment on terminals equipped with Snapdragon and Qualcomm platforms. At the beginning of the release, the model library provided developers with more than 75 mainstream AI and generative AI models, such as Whisper, ControlNet, Stable Diffusion, and Baihuan-7B, which can be packaged in different execution environments, and can achieve excellent terminal side AI performance, reduce memory usage, and improve energy efficiency in different forms of terminals. And the model base is still updating rapidly with the times.

All models in the model library have been optimized to make full use of the hardware acceleration capabilities of all cores (NPU, CPU and GPU) in the Qualcomm AI engine, so as to increase the reasoning speed by four times. The AI model library can automatically process the model transformation from the source framework to the mainstream execution environment, work directly with the Qualcomm AI engine Direct SDK, and apply hardware aware optimization. Developers can seamlessly integrate these models into applications, shorten the time to market, and take advantage of terminal AI deployment, such as immediacy, reliability, privacy, personalization, and cost advantages.

·Conclusion

At present, AIGC is in its infancy. Qualcomm entered the market at this time by virtue of the two major platforms of the Snapdragon X series, and it was quite proud to "look around at the vast universe, and let the sun, moon and stars climb". The traditional PC industry, which is "thinking about change" and "seeking change", also needs such fresh blood to jointly drive a new round of innovation with AI as the core.

What Qualcomm Snapdragon X series brings is not simply high-performance hardware, but a complete set of software and hardware ecosystem built around Snapdragon X. Its emergence will certainly bring a huge impact on the existing pattern of the traditional PC industry. On the one hand, it will take a share of the market and enhance the vitality and competitiveness of the whole market; On the other hand, users can get more choices and benefit from the high performance, energy efficiency ratio, long endurance and other features of Snapdragon X platform. At the same time, the 45TOPS NPU, the first of its kind on the Snapdragon X platform, will promote the evolution of AI applications, improve AI computing efficiency and AI application experience. It can be said that the appearance of Snapdragon X platform has solved the problem of insufficient energy efficiency ratio of PC hardware and insufficient computing power of NPU AI for a period of time.

Therefore, Qualcomm's entry into the traditional PC industry is in line with the saying, "If there is a moon without a star, it is cold; if there is a star without a moon, it is dim light; if the stars and the moon shine together, it is a win-win situation".

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