this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2024
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Not sure why you'd want an ARM-based handheld to play PC games at this point in time. Pretty much all PC games are available in x86 only, and any efficiency gains these fancy new ARM chips supposedly have will be lost when translating x86 to ARM.
Not a given. Translating can still be more efficient.
If both AMD/Intel and Qualcomm do a good job with their core design and the same process node is used, I don't see how a translation layer can be any faster than a CPU natively supporting the architecture. Any efficiency advantages ARM supposedly has over x86 architecturally will vanish in such a scenario.
I actually think the efficiency of these new Snapdragon chips is a bit overhyped, especially under sustained load scenarios (like gaming). Efficiency cores won't do much for gaming, and their iGPU doesn't seem like anything special.
We need a lot more testing with proper test setups. Currently, reviewers mostly test these chips and compare them against other chips in completely different devices with a different thermal solution and at different levels of power draw (TDP won't help you much as it basically never matches actual power draw). Keep in mind the Snapdragon X Elite can be configured for up to "80W TDP".
Burst performance from a Cinebench run doesn't tell the real story and comparing runtimes for watching YouTube videos on supposedly similar laptops doesn't even come close to representing battery life in a gaming scenario.
Give it a few years/generations and then maybe, but currently I'm pretty sure the 7840U comfortably stomps the X Elite in gaming scenarios with both being configured to a similar level of actual power draw. And the 7840U/8840U is AMD's outgoing generation, their new (horribly named) chips should improve performance/watt by quite a bit.
Not what i am saying. I said that it is not a given, that translation means less performance.
In theory you can achieve similar or even higher performance, all depending on how well or how bad the original machine code is. Especially when you can optimize it for a specific architecture or even a specific CPU.
And yes ARM has shown to be more power efficient then x86 CPUs even on higher load (not just low powered embedded stuff).
Wine/Proton on Linux occasionally beats Windows on the same hardware in gaming, because there's inefficiencies in the original environment which isn't getting replicated unnecessarily.
It's not quite the same with CPU instruction translation, but the main efficiency gain from ARM is being designed to idle everything it can idle while this hasn't been a design goal of x86 for ages. A substantial factor to efficiency is figuring out what you don't have to do, and ARM is better suited for that.
It has been since P4
As you said yourself, it's not the same thing. Proton can occasionally beat Windows because Vulkan might be more efficient doing certain things compared to DirectX (same with other APIs getting translated to other API calls). This is all way more abstract compared to CPU instruction sets.
If Qualcomm actually managed to somehow accurately (!) run x86 code faster on their ARM hardware compared to native x86 CPUs on the same process node and around the same release date, it would mean they are insanely far ahead (or, depending on how you look at it, Intel/AMD insanely far behind).
And as I said, any efficiency gains in idle won't matter for gaming scenarios, as neither the CPU nor the GPU idle at any point during gameplay.
With all that being said: I think Qualcomm did a great job and ARM on laptops (outside of Apple) might finally be here to stay. But they won't replace x86 laptops anytime soon, and it'll take even longer to make a dent in the PC gaming market because DIY suddenly becomes very relevant. So I don't think ("PC") gaming handhelds should move to ARM anytime soon.
I think that's what we see with apple silicon, right?
Ehhh, kinda. Intel E-cores kinda throw off the balance a bit, but generally yeah.
It's not that uncommon in specialty hardware with CPU instructions extensions for a different architecture made available specifically for translation. Some stuff can be quite efficiently translated on a normal CPU of a different architecture, some stuff needs hardware acceleration. I think Microsoft has done this on some Surface devices.
@ShortN0te @narc0tic_bird + battery life, which is always useful on a handheld
You would need some ISA that greatly benefits from translating. Like ELBRUS.
Rephrasing you: "Pretty much all PC games are available in Windows only, and any efficiency gains these fancy free Linux OS supposedly have will be lost when translating Windows to Linux."
No, that's not at all what I said. Translating between CPU architectures and translating API calls isn't even close to the same thing.
Obviously. Games are compiled for Linux natively. Same can be done for Linux on ARM. Opensource games like Xonotic already do this, proprietary games like War Thunder are compiled for ELBRUS and I'm sure can be compiled for ARM. If Valve wanted, they could release their games compiled for ARM tomorrow.
Porting games to a different architecture is normally quite a bit more involved than just recompiling them, especially when architecture-agnostic code wasn't a design goal of the original game code. No, Valve couldn't release all their games natively running on ARM tomorrow, the process would take more time.
But even if Valve were to recompile all their games for ARM, many other studios wouldn't just because a few gaming handhelds would benefit from it. The market share of these devices wouldn't be big enough to justify the cost. Very few of the games that run on Steam Deck are actually native Linux versions, studios just rarely bother porting their games over.
I'm not saying ARM chips can't be faster or otherwise better (more efficient) at running games, but it just doesn't make sense to release an ARM-based handheld intended for "PC" gaming in the current landscape of games.
Apple can comparatively easily force an architecture transition because they control fhe software and hardware. If Apple decides to only sell RISC-V based Macs tomorrow and abandon ARM, developers for the platform would have to release RISC-V builds of their software because at some point nobody could run their software natively anymore because current Macs would be replaced by RISC-V Macs as time passed by. Valve does not control the full hard- and software stack of the PC market so they'd have a very hard time to try and force such a move. If Valve released an ARM-based gaming handheld, other manufacturers would still continue offering x86-based handhelds with newer and newer CPUs (new x86 hardware is still being developed for the foreseeable future) and instead of Valve forcing developers to port their games to native ARM, they'd probably lose market share to these other handhelds as people would naturally buy the device that runs current games best right now.
In a "perfect world" where all games would natively support ARM right now an ARM-based handheld for PC gaming could obviously work. That simply isn't the world we live in right now though. Sure we could ramble on about "if this and that", it's just not the reality.