Qualcomm’s next-generation Snapdragon 810 will have an all-new GPU. Photo: Qualcomm
Qualcomm is going to make us wait a little longer for the upcoming Snapdragon 810’s juicy details, but the company has already announced its new and improved graphics processing unit. Dubbed Adreno 530, the new GPU promises significant performance improvements and greater efficiency.
Vulkan is coming to Android. Photo: Samsung
Apple Metal, introduced at last year’s WWDC, gives developers low-level access to the GPU to maximize the graphics and performance potential of their games. Now Android gamers are going to get a taste of that, too.
No, Apple isn’t bringing Metal to Android — but Google is adopting an alternative called Vulkan.
Right in the centre of the smartphone revolution is Qualcomm, whose processors and modems are found inside every major smartphone nowadays. The company has played a major role in making LTE a common feature in today’s smartphones and has constantly pushed the bar forward in mobile performance and battery life.
Qualcomm usually releases two major SoCs in a year, around which most OEMs plan their device launches. This year, Qualcomm unveiled the Snapdragon 801 at MWC, a seemingly minor upgrade over its predecessor — the Snapdragon 800. The successor of 801 though, dubbed Snapdragon 805, is slated to be released later this year and promises to push the bar in terms of performance in mobile devices even higher.
Asus has today announced its latest Transformer Pad Infinity slate at Computex 2013 in Taipei, and boy is it a beast. Not only does it carry NVIDIA’s latest Tegra 4 processor — which has a 72-core GeForce GPU — but it also has a 10.1-inch display with the same 2560×1600 resolution as the 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro.
That’s a whopping 299 pixels-per-inch.
NVIDIA’s quad-core Tegra 3 processor powers some of today’s most impressive Android devices, and you certainly wouldn’t call it dated. But the company has another processor up its sleeve that blows the Tegra 3 right out of the water. A slide, purportedly detailing the next-generation Tegra 4 (nicknamed “Wayne”), has been leaked — and it reveals that NVIDIA plans to bring a “Quad Core Eagle” CPU with 72-core graphics to your smartphone.
