Load a 3D game on a mid-range Android phone this year and watch it not turn into a slideshow. That smoothness is doing more for Qualcomm than any clock-speed bullet point, and the part responsible is the Adreno 205 buried inside the Snapdragon S2. I have spent the last few weeks with S2 hardware, and what keeps catching me off guard is how much of the experience now rides on the graphics block rather than the CPU everyone fixates on. I was already a fan of the Snapdragon chip since my time working on the TG01, which was the first to enable DivX playback via the CoreCodec app using hardware acceleration. And for commuting, hell yeah!
The S2 is the chip Qualcomm slotted in above its aging single-core stuff and below whatever comes next. At its heart sits one Scorpion core, Qualcomm’s own take on an ARMv7 design that looks a lot like a Cortex-A8 with the company’s fingerprints all over it, clocked anywhere from 1 GHz in a normal phone to 1.4 or 1.5 GHz in the parts that want bragging rights (Was max 1GHz for the first Snapdragon chip). It is built on a 45nm process, carries a Hexagon DSP for the signal-processing grunt work, talks to dual-channel LPDDR2, pushes HSPA+ at up to 21 Mbps, and drives cameras up to 12 megapixels. None of that is the headline. The headline is that the Adreno 205 is a real generational jump over the Adreno 200, and it is the reason the mid-range suddenly handles OpenGL ES 2.0 content the way the high end did a year ago.
There is a bit of history worth knowing here, because it explains why Qualcomm’s GPU keeps punching above the spec sheet. Adreno is what Qualcomm built out of the handheld graphics team it bought from AMD, the old Imageon line, and the name itself is an anagram of Radeon. Most of the SoC world licenses Imagination’s PowerVR or leans on ARM’s Mali and calls it a day. Qualcomm owns its graphics outright, and the 205 is the first time that ownership shows up as a clear advantage you can feel rather than a line in a datasheet.
What is striking me more than the silicon is the spread. Qualcomm is telling anyone who will listen that something like 120 device designs are in the pipeline on Snapdragon, and you can see it. The S2 is turning up in HTC’s lineup, in Sony Ericsson phones, in the webOS hardware HP inherited from Palm, even in BlackBerry’s newer kit. Qualcomm also has Windows Phone 7 covered, which matters more than the Android crowd wants to admit, because Microsoft handed Qualcomm a near-lock on the chipset slot for that platform. When you are the safe default across four operating systems, you do not need to win every benchmark, a point that was already obvious when CES opened the year on a wave of Android hardware.
The competition is real, and I am not going to pretend the S2 wins cleanly. Texas Instruments’ OMAP is in plenty of flagships; Samsung’s Hummingbird pairs a Cortex-A8 with a very strong PowerVR GPU; and Nvidia’s Tegra 2 is the loud new dual-core arrival that the S2 simply does not match in raw multi-threaded throughput because it is still one core. That single core is the S2’s ceiling, and everybody in the room knows the next fight is multi-core. I am not wading into the Hummingbird-versus-Adreno GPU holy war today; the comparison shifts with every driver update anyway. It does not help that Samsung is busy fabbing the Apple A4 on its own 45nm line while competing in the phone market, which tells you how tangled this industry already is.
Qualcomm has also started waving around an LTE part, the MSM8960, as the thing that brings the modem and the application processor onto one die for fourth-generation networks. That is a roadmap promise more than a product I can hold, and LTE coverage where I live is mostly a press release. But the direction is obvious, and it is the part of Qualcomm’s story that nobody else can copy easily, because nobody else owns the modem the way Qualcomm does.
If you came up reading the 2006 piece on where the Scorpion core started and the 2009 move that finally put all these part numbers under the Snapdragon name, the S2 is what that branding exercise was building toward: a chip people pick on purpose. It is not the fastest thing announced this year, and the single-core is going to look quaint the moment dual-core Android phones become the norm. But it took graphics in the middle of the market from embarrassing to properly good, and it did it while Qualcomm quietly designed itself into nearly everything. The CPU is where next year’s argument lives. The GPU is where this year’s actually won.