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Qualcomm announces Adreno 530

by on12 August 2015


40 percent better than Adreno 430

Qualcomm has just announced the successor of Adreno 400 series and as we expected this new GPU is called Adreno 5xx. 

The new GPU will find its place in top notch processors including highly anticipated Snapdragon 820 and is 620/618 processors. It launches in two variations, Adreno 530 and Adreno 510.

The company shared some performance and power figures with Fudzilla and it turns out that the Snapdragon 820 with Adreno 530 gets 40 percent more performance on average in graphics benchmarks, compared to the Snapdragon 810 with Adreno 430.

At the same time Snapdragon 820 with Adreno 530 consumes 40 percent less power than the Snapdragon 810 with Adreno 430.

adreno530

The Adreno 530 will have superior GPGPU compute performance. The new things on the new GPU side are the OpenCL 2.0 full GPU Rendersript support, which generally improved GPU compute performance and has 64-bit virtual addressing. The Adreno 530 can share virtual memory with the CPU for heterogeneous computing and has faster video processing and computational camera at lower power. Adreno 530 support includes OpenGL ES 3.1+AEP (Adreno Extension Pack), Renderscript, as well as the new OpenCL 2.0 and Vulkan standards. Vulkan minimizes driver overhead and enables multi-threaded performance on mobile and embedded platforms.

In some cases Adreno 530 will be able to finish video processing workloads two and a half times faster than the Adreno 430 with Snapdragon 810. Qualcomm didn’t want to get into many more details.

The new thing inside of the Snapdragon 820 is the new 14-bit Qualcomm Spectra image signal processing (ISP) unit, designed to support superior DSLR-quality photography and enhanced computer vision.
 
Tim Leland, vice president, product management, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc had this to say:


“We’re significantly enhancing the visual processing capabilities of Snapdragon to support next-generation user experiences related to computational photography, computer vision, virtual reality and photo-realistic graphics on mobile devices, all while maximizing battery life,”. “Spectra ISP, together with our Adreno 5xx-class GPU, brings an entirely new level of imaging to smartphones, and is designed to allow Snapdragon-powered devices to capture ultra-clear, vivid photos and videos regardless of motion and lighting conditions and display them with the color accuracy that nature intended.  In addition, as emerging growth segments such as automotive demand more immersive visual experiences, Snapdragon 820 will enable the next generation of infotainment, computer vision and advanced processing for instrument clusters.” 

Qualcomm will bring up to 4K HEVC video support at 60fps over HDMI 2.0 to Rec. 2020 ultra-high definition (UHD) displays and TVs. From the graphics point of view Snapdragon 820 looks like a winner against the competition. The only company that could make them run for their money is Nvidia and it won't be able to compete in the phone business as they got out of it. Others stand little chance against the Adreno 530.

Devices based on Snapdragon 820 are expected in the first half of 2016, which is not a big surprise.

 

Last modified on 12 August 2015
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