Adreno rush
We've spent much of MWC 2010 listening to the competing claims of various SoC makers and trying to make sense of it all. Probably the biggest feature they're all trying to bring to our attention is graphics processing.
It's not enough for smartphones to do a million different things now, you see, they've got to do it in a pretty, high definition way.
Qualcomm capitalised on AMD financially crippling itself with the acquisition of ATI by snapping-up the ATI handheld business unit for a bargain $65 milion a year or so ago. While Qualcomm was already licensing ATI graphics for its own chip, it's now had a year to develop the technology itself, and the result is the Adreno graphics platform.
Adreno is making an appearance in the MSM 7230, which has the same CPU core as Snapdragon - Scorpion - but isn't Snapdragon branded because it's targeted specifically at smartphones and is lower price. However, it should have close to Snapdragon performance (it will be clocked at between 800 MHz and 1 GHz), and this new graphics.
Qualcomm was showing a reference platform demonstrating Adreno's graphics capabilities and below you can see four videos running simultaneously. Smartphones containing the MSM 7230 chip are expected to hit the market this summer.
