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 2009 for $65M. 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

Adreno 100 series

Adreno 200 series - yamato / leia

Adreno 300 series - oxili

Adreno 400 series

Adreno 500 series

Adreno 600 series

Adreno 700 series

Adreno 800 series

Adreno X series

Operating system support

There are proprietary drivers for the Linux-based mobile operating system Android available from Qualcomm themselves. Historically the only way to have GPU support on non-Android Linux was with the libhybris wrapper. Linux and Mesa supports the Adreno 200/300/400/500 series of GPUs with a driver called . Freedreno allows fully open-source graphics on devices like the 96Boards Dragonboard 410c and Nexus 7 (2013). Qualcomm also provides Adreno drivers for ARM64 versions of Microsoft Windows. Since Linux kernel 6.11, the mainline Linux kernel has added Adreno drivers for Qualcomm Snapdragon X system-on-a-chips.