Adreno is a series of graphics processing unit (GPU) semiconductor intellectual property cores developed by Qualcomm and used in many of their SoCs.
History
Adreno is an integrated graphics processing unit (GPU) within Qualcomm's Snapdragon applications processors, that was jointly developed by ATI Technologies in conjunction with Qualcomm's preexisting "QShader" GPU architecture, and coalesced into a single family of GPUs that rebranded as Adreno in 2008, just prior to AMD's mobile division being sold to Qualcomm in January of 2009 for $65M. Apocryphal claims that Adreno was intentionally named by Qualcomm as anagram of ATI's Radeon family of desktop PC GPUs are false. Early Adreno models included the Adreno 100 and 110, which had 2D graphics acceleration and limited multimedia capabilities. Prior to 2008, 3D graphics on mobile platforms were commonly handled using software-based rendering engines, which limited their performance and consumed too much power to be used for anything other than rudimentary mobile graphics applications. With growing demand for more advanced multimedia and 3D graphics capabilities, Qualcomm licensed the Imageon IP from AMD, in order to add hardware-accelerated 3D capabilities to their mobile products. Further collaboration with AMD resulted in the development of the Adreno 200, originally named the AMD Z430, based on a mobile Imageon variant of the R400 architecture used in the Xenos GPU of the Xbox 360 video game console and released in 2008, which was integrated into the first Snapdragon SoC. In January 2009, AMD sold their entire Imageon handheld device graphics division to Qualcomm.
Technical details
Before Adreno
Support up to 320x240
Defender3 and Stargate have Texture compression
Adreno 100 series
Adreno 130 is rebrand of Imageon 3D
Adreno 200 series - yamato / leia
All models support the following APIs: Direct3D 11 (feature level 9_3), OpenGL ES 2.0
Adreno 300 series - oxili
All models support the following APIs: Direct3D 11 (feature level 9_3), OpenCL 1.1, OpenGL ES 3.0 Move from VLIW to superscalar architecture
Adreno 400 series
All models support the following APIs: Direct3D 11, OpenCL 1.2, OpenGL ES 3.2 and Vulkan 1.0 (except Adreno 405)
Adreno 500 series
All models support the following APIs: Direct3D 11, OpenCL 2.0, OpenGL ES 3.2 and Vulkan 1.0
Adreno 600 series
All models support the following APIs: Direct3D 12_1, OpenCL 2.0, OpenGL ES 3.2 and Vulkan 1.1 Adreno 660 is the first mobile GPU to feature Variable Rate Shading (VRS).
Adreno 700 series
All models support the following APIs: Direct3D 12_1, OpenCL 2.0, OpenGL ES 3.2 and Vulkan 1.1 Adreno 740 is the first GPU from Qualcomm to feature Ray tracing Adreno 750 is the first GPU from Qualcomm to support mesh shaders