Will Qualcomm be able to recover from their disastrous issues with the 810?
Qualcomm’s top of the line 810 processors has had a rough time ever since its introduction, mainly because of overheating issues. Qualcomm has been trying to move on from that debacle, and has revealed some details of its upcoming flagship 820 processor, namely the graphics processing unit and the image signal processor.
Obviously with a new processor comes a new GPU, and the 820 is no different. It’ll be powered by an Adreno 530 GPU, whihc promises a performance jump of 40% over the Adreno 430. What’s nice is that the 530 is able to achieve this performance increase with a signifant power requirement decrease, around 40% compared to the previous GPU. That means that the Adreno 530 is able to do more with less, which should mean increased battery life and decreased thermal issues while playing games and other graphically intensive tasks.
API wise the 530 will support OpenGL ES 3.1 and the Android Expansion pack, and for select platforms OpenGL ES 3.2 will also be supported, with backwarks compatibility for OpenGL 2.0 and Renderscript for GPGPU. The new GPU is also capable of wirelessly streaming 4K content at 30FPS, and 60FPS when connected via HDMI 2.0.
The new ISP is dubbed spectra, and brings a lot of new features to the table. For instance, Spectra can handle multi-camera setups with up to three(!) sensors working simultaneously, with the resolution cap being set at 25-megapixels, with video set to 30FPS at max resolution. Additional features include enhanced de-mosaicing as well as improved hybrid AF framework and more.
