The Qualcomm Snapdragon

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An annotated dieshot of what is claimed to be Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X processor has been posted on China’s Baidu platform by someone named Piglin. The image reveals massive CPU cores, a mid-sized GPU, and huge caches. Unfortunately, the die shot doesn’t reveal the 45 TOPS neural processing unit (NPU), the part that Qualcomm has credited as the main selling point of this system-on-chip.

The dieshot leak suggests that the 12-core Snapdragon X Elite will have a die size of 169.6mm^2. That’s slightly larger than Apple’s 10-core M4, which is 165.9mm^2. Still, it should be noted that Qualcomm’s Snapdragon -class). .

The main thing you’ll notice about the Snapdragon According to the leaker, each Oryon core is approximately 2.55mm^2, making them significantly larger than typical Arm CPU cores. Still, Apple’s high-performance general-purpose CPU cores used in the M4 are about 3mm² in size, and given the difference in process technology, it’s clear that Apple’s high-performance fourth-generation Arm cores are more complex than Oryon.

The CPU domain takes up 48.2 mm^2 of space, which is twice as large compared to the Adreno X1 GPU domain, which is 24.3 mm^2. Considering that the GPU is relatively small, it’s not surprising that it doesn’t really deliver high performance. Qualcomm says the GPU delivers around 4.6 FP32 TFLOPS of raw performance, which is just slightly lower than the 4.8 FP32 TFLOPS of Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3050, which isn’t bad at all.

Another thing that catches the eye are the massive caches: the Snapdragon cache of about 12 MB (spread over several levels). In total, the CPU has 54 MB of different caches that take up about 15 mm^2 of die size.

The processor also has a 128-bit LPDDR5X-8448 memory interface, an NPU, a display controller, an ISP, and several special components not annotated in the image.