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  • jjj - Tuesday, September 4, 2018 - link

    Good first step but could be expanded well beyond the GPU and the entire system built around it.
    Been thinking about this for some years and could lead to very different hardware if you have an NPU manage everything.
  • ZolaIII - Tuesday, September 4, 2018 - link

    NNPU didn't even earn to eat hire. No one will do it better than your self. Switching off two big cores does much more than all this fuss about GPU turbo.
  • mode_13h - Tuesday, September 4, 2018 - link

    Not to agree or disagree with your point, but I think you mean "here" instead of "hire".
  • mode_13h - Tuesday, September 4, 2018 - link

    You mean like this?

    https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&a...
  • mode_13h - Tuesday, September 4, 2018 - link

    Anyway, I'm thinking a deep learning model could probably do a better job at managing core clock speeds and perhaps even deciding whether to schedule certain tasks on big vs. little cores.
  • ZolaIII - Wednesday, September 5, 2018 - link

    We (not AI) need to evolve scheduler logic and add SMP affinity flags to processes. Only then game's can begin. Here goes the rain again. By the way thanks for that.
  • mr_tawan - Tuesday, September 4, 2018 - link

    Does it raytrace?
  • Manch - Wednesday, September 5, 2018 - link

    I think the question that should be asked is:

    Can it raytrace Crysis?
  • Lord of the Bored - Wednesday, September 5, 2018 - link

    I'd settle for raytracing FEAR.
  • sing_electric - Tuesday, September 4, 2018 - link

    This presents a quandary for benchmarking/reviewing: In the past, if a company released drivers that changed the performance of the device while running a specific app, we'd all call it "cheating" if that app was a benchmark. However, by extending the "cheats" to other apps, the user sees real benefits, even though it's the same behavior.

    It also means that performance numbers have to be taken with even more salt, because the performance on a popular app which has been "Turboed" by Huawei might not be indicative of the performance you see if you only say, play less popular games that Huawei hasn't profiled.
  • Ian Cutress - Tuesday, September 4, 2018 - link

    In the past, those 'cheats' were often from not rendering parts of the scene. This is still doing the full render that any Mali GPU does, but in a more power efficient way. The key to benchmarking is to test across several titles regardless, which is going to be important moving forward.
  • Manch - Wednesday, September 5, 2018 - link

    Does Mali or any mobile GPUs do culling of unseen objects? If not, can that be implemented to further reduce load?
  • The Hardcard - Tuesday, September 4, 2018 - link

    That isn’t a quandry, it solves the problem. The problem before is that the makers showed benchmark performance that they didn’t feel the device could handle in normal user apps. If this pans out and users can have it everyday apps means no harm, no foul.

    Having it be a special mode for apps that can use it, while turning it off when it is not necessary is exactly what is needed and what everyone is trying to do and should do.

    If they do it properly, then it is on the developers to use it. Sure, older, unupdated apps will be left behind. That is the nature of advancing technology.
  • melgross - Tuesday, September 4, 2018 - link

    A benchmark cheat is just for benchmarks. There’s a reason for that, and it has to do with the fact that the SoC, and the device, as a whole, can’t perform at that level commercially, otherwise something negative will happen, such as overheating, and battery failure.

    So, no, they can’t extend cheating to regular apps, and that’s the entire point to the cheat. If they could, then they would, and it wouldn’t be a cheat. This cheating is different from the turbo mode the article is about.
  • s.yu - Monday, September 10, 2018 - link

    The only way this is working is the apparent popularity of MMO games. They only plan on catering to low end customer who only play whatever "everybody else" plays. I for one avoid them like the plague, IAP rigged games are cheap stimulation, too cheap.
  • tipoo - Tuesday, September 4, 2018 - link

    Reminds me of the good old ATI vs Nvidia days when there were notable differences in render quality, usually with the edge to ATI. That all but went away at least as far back as the 8800, maybe before. Now for mobile to repeat that process.
  • Ian Cutress - Tuesday, September 4, 2018 - link

    Just to make sure you're aware, that's kind of orthogonal to GPU Turbo. It's Mali behaviour right now, which explains some of the perf differences, but GPU Turbo is something separate.
  • Lord of the Bored - Wednesday, September 5, 2018 - link

    Not ALWAYS to ATI, though. Sometimes they got a little aggressive in their "optimizations" too.
    QUAFF3 NEVER FORGET!

    https://techreport.com/review/3089/how-ati-drivers... ffor the kiddos that never saw this one. Back when men were men, and PC gaming was the exclusive domain of nerds that knew what IRQ and DMA meant(but probably not PCMCIA. No one could remember PCMCIA).
  • Holliday75 - Friday, September 7, 2018 - link

    I recently found a PCMCIA 10mb NIC in one of my file cabinets and a 28.8k modem. I looked at them a second like wtf then remembered what they were.
  • nils_ - Friday, September 7, 2018 - link

    People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms
  • eastcoast_pete - Tuesday, September 4, 2018 - link

    Thanks Andrei! I agree that this is, in principle, an interesting way to adjust power use and GPU performance in a finer-grained way than otherwise implemented. IMO, it also seems to be an attempt to push HiSlilicon's AI core, as its other benefits are a bit more hidden for now (for lack of a better word). Today's power modes (at least on Android) are a bit all-high or all-low, so anything finer grained is welcome. Question: how long can the "turbo" turbo for before it gets a bit warm for the SoC? Did Huawei say anything about thermal limitations? I assume the AI is adjusting according to outside temperature and SoC to outside temperature differential?

    Regardless of AI-supported or not, I frequently wish I could more finely adjust power profiles for CPU, GPU and memory and make choices for my phone myself, along the lines of: 1. Strong, short CPU and GPU bursts enabled, otherwise balanced, to account for thermals and battery use (most everyday use, no gaming), 2. No burst, energy saver all round (need to watch my battery use) and 3. High power mode limited only by thermals (gaming mode), but allows to vary power allocations to CPU and GPU cores. An intelligent management and power allocation would be great for all these, but especially 3.
  • Ian Cutress - Tuesday, September 4, 2018 - link

    GPU Turbo also has a CPU mode, if there isn't an NPU present. That's enabling Huawei to roll it out to older devices. The NPU does make it more efficient though.

    In your mode 3, battery life is still a concern. Pushing the power causes the efficiency to decrease as the hardware is pushed to the edge of its capabilities. The question is how much of a trade off is valid? Thermals can also ramp a lot too - you'll hit thermal skin temp limits a lot earlier than you think. That also comes down to efficiency and design.
  • kb9fcc - Tuesday, September 4, 2018 - link

    Sounds reminiscent of the days when nVidia and ATI would cook some code into their drivers that could detect when certain games and/or benchmarking tools were being run and tweak the performance to return results that favored their GPU.
  • mode_13h - Tuesday, September 4, 2018 - link

    Who's to say Nvidia isn't already doing a variation of GPU Turbo, in their game-ready drivers? The upside is less, with a desktop GPU, but perhaps they could do things like preemptively spike the core clock speed and dip the memory clock, if they knew the next few frames would be shader-limited but with memory bandwidth to spare.
  • Kvaern1 - Tuesday, September 4, 2018 - link

    I don't suppose China has a law that punishes partyboss owned corporation for making wild dishonest claims.
  • darckhart - Tuesday, September 4, 2018 - link

    ehhh it's getting hype now, but I bet it will only be supported on a few games/apps. it's a bit like nvidia's game ready drivers: sure the newest big name game releases get support (but only for newer gpu) and then what happens when the game updates/patches? will the team keep the game in the library and let the AI keep testing so as to keep it optimized? how many games will be added to the library? how often? which SoC will continue to be supported?
  • mode_13h - Tuesday, September 4, 2018 - link

    Of course, if they just operated a cloud service that automatically trained models based on automatically-uploaded performance data, then it could easily scale to most apps on most phones.
  • Ratman6161 - Tuesday, September 4, 2018 - link

    meh....only for games? So what. Yes, I know a lot of people reading this article care about games, but for those of us who don't this is meaningless. But looking at it as a gamer might, it still seems pretty worthless. Per soc and per game? That's going to take constant updates to keep up with the latest releases. And how long can they keep that up? Personally if I were that interested in games, I'd just buy something that's better at gaming to begin with.
  • mode_13h - Tuesday, September 4, 2018 - link

    See my point above.

    Beyond that, the benefits of a scheme like this, even on "something that's better at gaming to begin with", is longer battery life and less heat. Didn't you see the part where it clocks everything just high enough to hit 60 fps? That's as fast as most phone's displays will update, so any more and you're wasting power.
  • mode_13h - Tuesday, September 4, 2018 - link

    I would add that the biggest benefit is to be had by games, since they use the GPU more heavily than most other apps. They also have an upper limit on how fast they need to run.

    However, a variation on this could be used to manage the speeds of different CPU cores and the distribution of tasks between them.
  • dave_the_nerd - Tuesday, September 4, 2018 - link

    Honor 7x? How about the Mate SE, its Huawei twin? (We have one...)
  • mode_13h - Tuesday, September 4, 2018 - link

    > There is no silver bullet here – while an ideal goal would be a single optimized network to deal with every game in the market, we have to rely on default mechanisms to get the job done.

    Why not use distributed training across a sampling of players (maybe the first to download each new game or patch) and submit their performance data to a cloud-based training service? The trained models could then be redistributed and potentially further refined.
  • tygrus - Tuesday, September 4, 2018 - link

    The benefits seem <10% and don't beat the competition (eg. Samsung S8 to S9 models).

    Why 7 pages when it could have been done in 3 or 4 pages. The article needed more effort to edit and remove the repetition & fluff before publishing. Maybe I'm having a bad day but it just seemed harder to read than your usual.
  • LiverpoolFC5903 - Wednesday, September 5, 2018 - link

    That is the whole point of the article, to go into depth. If you dont like technical 'fluff', there are hundreds of sites out there with one pagers more to your liking. .
  • zodiacfml - Wednesday, September 5, 2018 - link

    I guess, I im not wrong when I first of heard this. I was thinking "dynamic resolution" or image quality reducing feature that works on the fly.
  • s.yu - Friday, September 7, 2018 - link

    Technically Huawei isn't directly responsible, you know the article said that all Mali devices run on lower settings.
    The thing you didn't anticipate is that they were citing numbers compared to Kirin 960, that threw everyone off. Seeing as they're Huawei I knew they were lying somehow, but seeing how Intel put their cross-generation comparisons in big bold print for so long I didn't realize somebody could hide such a fact in small print, or even omit that in most presentations.
  • Manch - Wednesday, September 5, 2018 - link

    <quote> (Ed: We used to see this a lot in the PC space over 10 years ago, where different GPUs would render different paths or have ‘tricks’ to reduce the workload. They don’t anymore.) </quote>

    How does this not happen anymore? Both Nvidia & AMD create game ready drivers to optimize for diff games. AMD does tend to optimize for Mantle/Vulkan moreso than DX12(Explain SB AMD...WTF?). Regardless these optimizations are meant to extract the best performance per game. Part of that is reducing workload per frame to increase overall FPS, so I don't see how this does not happen anymore.
  • Ian Cutress - Wednesday, September 5, 2018 - link

    Thus comment was more about the days where 'driver optimizations' meant trading off quality for performance, and vendors were literally reducing the level of detail to get better performance. Back in the day we had to rename Quake3 to Quack3 to show the very visible differences that these 'optimizations' had on gameplay.
  • Manch - Wednesday, September 5, 2018 - link

    Ah OK, makes sense. I do remember those shenanigans.Thanks
  • Manch - Wednesday, September 5, 2018 - link

    oops, messed up the quotes....no coffee :/
  • LiverpoolFC5903 - Wednesday, September 5, 2018 - link

    Very interesting to say the least. The improvements from this, although not as much as promised, are still tangible and will make a difference in supported games.

    Also, alarming to see the quality difference between an Adreno unit and a Mali unit, especially considering they are supposed to be close competitors. I have an S9 with the Mali g72mp18 unit and going by the results on PUBG, it performs much worse than its Adreno counterpart, both in render quality and framerate.

    Hisilicon and Samsung should consider using Powervr gpus again, given the clear inability of the Mali to keep up. I have noticed this in the real world as well, with my LG V20 with a Snapdragon 820 lasting MUCH longer than my S9 while running emulators (PSP and Neo Geo), despite being years old.
  • Manch - Wednesday, September 5, 2018 - link

    Maybe its my screen but the Honor Play and the S9 pics make it look like the dude got no undies. LOL
  • umano - Wednesday, September 5, 2018 - link

    Amazing article, thank you. Having a P20 pro ( I don't play games on phone ) that was particularly interesting and I really liked the "ethic" behind words, supporting both customers and the company, asking the latter to do the right thing. I think this is the way professional journalism has to be done.
    Chapeau
  • AshokGupta - Wednesday, September 5, 2018 - link

    Hundreds of Huawei's competaters have tried round and round to prove GPU Turbo is a fake junk, and all of them failed. Now you take over their job. Good Luck, Man!
  • GreenReaper - Wednesday, September 5, 2018 - link

    Fake? No. But the reality doesn't exactly match up to the marketing.
  • s.yu - Friday, September 7, 2018 - link

    The reality doesn't match up to the marketing, AT ALL. Good as fake.
    Huawei in all practicality was trying to sell this off as a *universal* performance and efficiency gain of 60%, 30% respectively while in fact it only works on *a handful* of games for about *10%* each. When you're exaggerating your claims by 3x, 6x, it's lying, it's fake.
  • AshokGupta - Saturday, September 8, 2018 - link

    If you read the Chinese media, what happens here is just repetition of what happened exactly right after the technology was launched in CHINA. Including this stupid guess of saying it only covers few games. Then approved by many independent tech media it's applicable for all. Your name indicates you are most probably from China. I suppose you should know it. Don't understand why you come here again giving the approved fake comments.
  • s.yu - Monday, September 10, 2018 - link

    Because of the opaque operation of Chinese media. Obviously you're also from China, don't tell me you don't know about the fuss Huawei created buying ads on international sites and then buying fake journalism back in China.
    http://tech.ifeng.com/a/20180710/45057623_0.shtml
    This article was widely spread as legit news but the international content cited was intentionally twisted, it's highly misleading.
    When Huawei buys western ads at least the hosts declare bought articles, in China there's no way of telling real journalism from Huawei's smokescreen, so I put off reaching a conclusion until global availability of the technology.
    Now from Anandtech's analysis and *interview* it's obviously certain that the tech only works on a handful of games, Huawei even admitted that each profile is trained separately then pushed to devices.
    I know a Huawei troll when I see one, I'll be keeping an eye on you in the future.
  • ET - Wednesday, September 5, 2018 - link

    What's with the annoying 'Buy the Right CPU' autoplaying video?
  • psychobriggsy - Wednesday, September 5, 2018 - link

    It's really annoying, and on every article, on every page, and it doesn't remember if you pause it on one page then go to the next.
  • GreenReaper - Wednesday, September 5, 2018 - link

    > all members of the invited press to the show, typically around 500-2000, are sampled

    Curious.... so, what you're saying is that a Chinese company is going all-out to provide devices designed to monitor personal data to every possible tech journalist - and they can now coincidentally no longer become root to investigate them...?
  • Smell This - Wednesday, September 5, 2018 - link

    Creative Engineering

    (i.e., imaginative and innovative marketing ___ to cheat)

    ;-)
  • yhselp - Wednesday, September 5, 2018 - link

    If GPU Turbo is actually capable of smoothing out frame-time, it might be a huge win for consumers. It doesn't matter how pretty a game looks, or how fast it renders, if it has an inconsistent frame-time, making the controls sluggish. Any person who cares about gaming on a smartphone, especially something like PUBG and MOBAs, should find responsive controls preferable over higher image quality and sheer framerate. If Huawei manages to deliver smoother gameplay on its devices, it would be a huge win, despite the lower image quality.

    Hopefully they make tools to test frame-time easily available. We can't expect Digital Foundry to manually test every supported Kirin device and game.
  • s.yu - Friday, September 7, 2018 - link

    It's a huge loss for consumers in the long term if they get away time and again with their deception.
  • Achtung_BG - Wednesday, September 5, 2018 - link

    I love anandtech, good job!
  • Flunk - Wednesday, September 5, 2018 - link

    "Up To" always makes me suspicious, always. I could claim that adding my sticker to your phone could offer up to a 200% frame rate increase and still not technically be incorrect.
  • s.yu - Friday, September 7, 2018 - link

    I agree, how about citing the 1st percentage of performance numbers, read a spike for a second and stick it on the ad.
  • mazz7 - Thursday, September 6, 2018 - link

    Huawei is surely moving fast in this mobile arena :) look forward into the new device that use Kirin 980
  • abufrejoval - Thursday, September 6, 2018 - link

    Can't say that I care that much about mobile gaming any more, did some on the tablets but since those only receive left-over hardware these days, I'll just stick to the desktop for gaming.

    I could be attracted to buy a Kirin 980 device, simply to play with the NN accellerator, but with a locked down bootloader, they locked themselves out of my MVP.

    Hopefully a HiKey980 model will be available shortly, that doesn't have this crazy limitation, I was getting very close to buying the HiKey970, when the Kirin 980 appeared.

    I still fail to see the rationale behind the lock-down decision and I wish you could have drilled a bit into the engineers in Berlin to find out why they changed their policy. If it's all about hiding the architectural weaknesses you so regularly expose, it doesn't really seem to be working.

    It's a little irritating that HMD/Nokia is following the same path and it's easy to see why phone for the Chinese domestic market would be locked down by order of the government to ensure any government trojan is properly protected from removal.

    But EU/free world imports without unlockable bootloader should really be banned.

    If it's all about compensating for the lack of a secure element or HSM on the phone e.g. for payment, it's just a very bad design choice. I understand why Google didn't want the Telcos charge rent on SIM cards, but an approach like the L4 kernel on a dedicated CPU chosen by Apple seems a better alternative.
  • s.yu - Friday, September 7, 2018 - link

    So it's settled then, by Anandtech as always. Great work!
  • mikael.skytter - Monday, September 10, 2018 - link

    Hello!
    Problem on Page 5. There is a large video between the buttons comparing phones and the picture that displays the different phones in PUBG.

    Thanks!
    /Mikael
  • Ethos Evoss - Wednesday, September 26, 2018 - link

    I just got Huawei Honor Note10 and it has turbo .. :) BEST smartpohne ever
  • Suraj tiwari - Thursday, January 31, 2019 - link

    Even powervr gpus' r better than mali gpus'. I was surprised when samsung didn't buy powerver but soon realised that bcz they have long contract with ARM & Mali gpus' r cheap
  • annasansers12 - Thursday, April 25, 2019 - link

    Huawei's latest feature which is the GPU Turbo technology wishes it's users a good <a href="https://www.itechgyan.com/rules-of-survival-pc/&qu... news </a> for this year. It would really fit to my standard since it doesn't eat much of the battery life and loading of game is quite fast. This phone is really something.

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