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SnapdragonUpdated

Qualcomm announced its new Adreno 530 architecture at SIGGRAPH this week, and the company has big plans for its next-generation GPU. Qualcomm has been steadily improving the performance and capability of its Adreno hardware with each successive generation, and the upcoming 530 and the lower-cease variant, the 510, are no exception. What's changed this fourth dimension around is that Qualcomm doesn't just desire to provide a solution that plays common titles like Candy Crush or Game of State of war. The Adreno 530 is meant to address the core of the gaming market, with support for both augmented and virtual reality (AR and VR respectively).

With the Adreno 530, Qualcomm is predicting operation improvements of up to 40% compared to the older Adreno 430, while power consumption is expected to fall by forty%. Those are significant gains from a 20nm – 14nm transition, merely in that location are ways to pull off such improvements — Nvidia's Maxwell vastly improved functioning and performance per watt over Kepler while remaining on 28nm, and information technology's possible that the Adreno 430 had some low-hanging architectural fruit that Qualcomm optimized while simultaneously benefiting from the transition to 14nm. While the Adreno 430 already supports Vulkan, the Adreno 530 is the get-go fleck designed for that API from the basis upwards.

Adreno530

GPGPU functioning uplift

The gains in video processing and GPGPU operation are besides impressive. Nosotros were a bit surprised to hear Qualcomm talking up heterogeneous calculating as a major focus for this chip. Thus far, AMD has been the simply visitor to make GPGPU compute the cornerstone of its product strategy. Qualcomm already uses GPU offload for certain camera processing tasks, and the company'south video processing capabilities have taken a huge step forrard in this new architecture. The Adreno 530 will be fully OpenCL 2.0 and Renderscript-compliant, The 64-bit virtual address feature is of import, since the upcoming Kryo CPU is a 64-bit ARM processor. This slide implies that Qualcomm has implemented some of the same functions that AMD showtime debuted with Kaveri, which would brand sense, since QC has always been a member of the HSA Foundation. What this means for software or ecosystem evolution remains to exist seen.

The other side of the Adreno 530 are the improvements to the scrap'south camera design. Qualcomm is calling its next-generation image signal processor (ISP) "Spectra," and it brings a number of new features to the table.

Spectre

Spectra is designed to allow for effectively goose egg shutter lag, improved low-light photography, offers superior digital zoom, and implements algorithms to reduce radial noise and colour artifacts in hardware. The Internet access provider supports dual front or rear cameras for depth-based photography and can perform both pre and post-processing to ensure superior epitome quality. Other mutual features similar image stabilization have been improved too. Smartphone cameras have fabricated huge strides over the by five years, but they withal stake in comparison to a DSLR in certain environments. Nosotros don't await that gap to vanish (there are technical reasons why loftier-end cameras are superior to even the best smartphones), merely we're happy to see manufacturers go on to shrink the gap.

As for the rest of the SoC, the rumor factory has been busy. Kryo will reportedly back up LPDDR4 (likely) simply core count rumors have been all over the map. Some have suggested that the Snapdragon 820 volition top out at just four CPU cores, but equally much equally we'd like to see companies haul dorsum on the cadre count reins, information technology's not guaranteed to happen. The phone-crazy Chinese market place puts a high value on CPU cadre counts, and Qualcomm can't actually afford to manus MediaTek or Rockchip a marketing coup. On the other hand, if the Kryo'due south functioning is strong enough, Qualcomm might decide to highlight its superior performance as an advantage.

Devices with Adreno 530 are expected to be in client hands within the starting time half of side by side year. Given how long information technology takes to validate handsets, that implies volume production by the stop of Q4 2022.