Snapdragon GPU Area Efficiency Slides

TechInsights’ floorplan analysis of desktop-PC processors quantifies the size difference among AMD and Intel CPUs.

Joseph Byrne

MediaTek and Qualcomm are employing bigger GPUs in their flagship smartphone processors as they pursue higher performance. Their chips now surpass that found in the iPhone, but Apple has held GPU area constant (adjusting for process technology) while achieving performance gains.

Analysis of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 (SD8G2) processor reveals that it employs more GPU cores than its predecessor and adds logic blocks not previously seen. These changes increased its area but performance gains aren’t commensurate. Moreover, we infer that the company slowed the GPU clock to avoid overheating, further reducing area efficiency.

The Arm’s Immortalis G715 GPU instance in MediaTek’s Dimensity 9200 also has more cores than its predecessor, but area efficiency increases owing to additional math hardware—enough to offset additional area allocated to new, underutilized ray-tracing functions. Like Qualcomm, Apple is tight- lipped about its GPU details other than to state the number of cores in its Bionic A16 smartphone processor. Most remarkable is how little Apple’s GPU area has changed even as the company has revised its architecture to achieve greater graphics throughput.