Question about Hardware Performance? Read Here.

[Telifex]

Since it's likely that as more people discover Dolphin for Android they are going to come running to the forums asking what phone they should buy to play when development is done, I thought I'd preempt some of those posts by giving a general overview of the two most relevant SoC vendors, the state of their current products, and what we can expect from future phones/tablets.

This is a purely hardware discussion, Actual software implementation will be platform dependent.

NOTE: This is an extrapolation using benchmarks from current CPUs and Dolphin Builds. All information is taken from a combination of Anandtech.com, Wikipedia, and 1st/2nd party Sources from Intel and Qualcomm. I've chosen Intel and Qualcomm platforms specifically due to their popularity and feature set.

NOTE: If you are currently capable of any gaming on dolphin I'd love some performance references. Feel free to pm me. Data will go towards posts like this.

TL;DR
-Drivers suck, getting better
-CPU performance better than you'd think, not there yet
-GPU performance problematic for a while
-Development should get easier rapidly

First thing!
-This is not about ARM vs x86
-Yes I will address ARM and x86 performance near the end

TL;DR: ARM vs x86 is not a concern you should have, Software stack vastly more important.


So where do we stand CPU wise?
-Both Krait and Atom are adopting "Big Core" architecture changes. Huge % IPC increase since Cortex A9
-Clock speeds have jumped from 1.5ghz to 2.5ghz quickly and continuing to climb. Likely cap similar to x86 Desktop.
-Atom and Krait have core scaling to adapt to variable core load
-Both have Intel "Big Core" like thermal management, Atom moreso

Spoiler: (Show Spoiler)

Intel just released the Bay Trail Platform featuring a newly redesigned atom that is a significant step forward. The tests Anandtech did showed it exceeding Snapdragon 800 performance by quite a margin and also compared the CPU performance against desktop x86 CPUs. If I get some more time I'll break down the benchmarks but in terms of raw single threaded performance the Atom z3770 at a boosted 2.4ghz was anywhere between 33% to 66% as powerful as a Sandy Bridge Generation 2.4ghz Pentium. This is primarily due to it's boost clock and architecture redesign. That said it was an impressive display from intel. As the Pentium 2020m is a mid range performer in dolphin and the mobile atom is within an order of magnitude in terms of performance, the atom should be able to emulate games slowly but smoothly as long as they are not the more demanding games, at least from the CPU side of things. Additionally, this is the first major revision to Atom since 2008 and intel has a lot of switches and knobs left to turn on the Silvermont architecture moving forward. Intel has also announced a tick/tock development cadence for atom just like their desktop SKUs, so expect Atom to rapidly evolve. The current generation Atom is an Out-of-Order Dual Issue superscalar design.

Qualcomm Snapdragon has been a go to development platform here on the Android development section as OpenGL ES 3.0 is supported in hardware by most of the snapdragon line. Snapdragon is also an incredibly popular SoC and as such I expect it will continue to evolve rapidly until it reaches the complexity limits much like x86 has. Beyond clock speed increases, efficiency increases and SoC improvements, Krait has seen about a 10% increase in IPC(S4 ->805). The current generation Krait is an Out-of-Order triple or Quad issue superscalar design.

So what device will be able to smoothly Emulate Dolphin first?
-Platform dependent, likely Snapdragon devices due to development popularity
-CPU wise Atom is significantly faster with less power usage under load.

How are we doing GPU wise?
-Both Snapdragon and Bay Trail SoC support OpenGl ES 3.0
-As noted in the Dolphin Development Blog the GPU driver side of things is considerably worse, but there is some hope.
-Hardware standards support is good but both memory bandwidth and GPU throughput are underwhelming but improving fast.
-Adreno 330 roughtly 50% of HD 4000 performance.

Spoiler: (Show Spoiler)

On the intel/Atom side of things there is quite a bit of hope. The Silvermont Z3770 only included 4 EUs of ivy bridge generation graphics and having personally used a 20EU Haswell IGP with mixed results I can say that the current bay trail platform is not nearly sufficient. However, intel has had a history of putting GFX development 2nd to CPU development on their architectures and I don't think I'm alone in expecting quite a bit more power with the next Generation Goldmont release. Still not enough for fluid dolphin, but a big step up. Additionally, since 2011 Intel has been investing quite a bit of development into its graphics drivers.

The Qualcomm snapdragon 805 and 810 include the Adreno 420/430 respectively which Qualcomm claims are 40% faster than their predecessors the 320/330. Snapdragon 800 and below have dual channel 32-bit ddr3, Snapdragon 801, 805 and 810 should have quad chanel 32-bit ddr3 providing twice the memory bandwidth. As far as drivers go Qualcomm has been pretty quiet and given their history of buggy drivers I'm cautiously hopeful.

Are there any Current Devices that have the hardware to Emulate Dolphin smoothly(if slow)?
-Yes-ish. As development has primarily been on Snapdragon based devices they are most likely. My Droid DNA is capable; clockspeed helps.
-Tablets will be better than phones due to TDP constraints. Aka, tablets will usually have higher CPU clocks, more memory bandwidth, and wider GPUs.
-In general, snapdragon S4 Pro and better(200,400,600,800,810)

Are there any Announced Devices that have the hardware to emulate Dolphin smoothly?
-No, but the 805 and 810 will be a big step up

Spoiler: (Show Spoiler)

-Quad Channel DDR3, (72% bandwidth increase over 800/801)
-40-50% projected GPU throughput increase
-Based on 64-bit ARM-57
-Nexus 6 Rumored to use 810

!!!To sum up, it's going to be a while until we get even native(1x) internal resolution at fast emulation rates even for not demanding games. The good news is that mobile SoCs are reaching performance levels where active development is less painful. !!!

[XxZombiePikachu]

you should also include that dolphin is very demanding and will heat up any phone very quickly with my g2 after about 15 minutes tempetures reach 50c and recent phones will either a) throttle once heat passes 50c or b)shut off all cores and reboot so that it may enter a cooling state and then there's the fact that even though you can emulate a game right now they are loading with a bunch of weird polygons and such