Qualcomm MSM8660 and Adreno 220 GPU demo

News · 16 Feb 2011 · MTW Editorial Team

Here’s a nice video I shot yesterday at Qualcomm’s booth showing the Adreno 220 GPU in action running an OpenGL ES 2.0 demo developed by Southend interactive (on Android). The development device that you see hooked up to the HDTV via the mini-HDMI port packs Qualcomm’s MSM8660 dual-core CPU and Adreno 220 GPU that is going to be found in HP Palm’s TouchPad (under the APQ8060 name) and apparently the HTC Pyramid (note that the output displayed on the TV is WVGA content upscaled to 1080P). I had a small chat with a couple of Qualcomm guys about their future SoCs and also the Windows Phone 7. I was once again told that they were working really closely with Microsoft right now on current Adreno 200 support (HLSL/ Programmable Shader support in XNA should by coming this year) and future Chassis which are being discussed and finalized right now (that’s what I got from the hints I was given). MS apparently is also wants to support higher resolution screens so newer SoCs are going to be certified. Because the of the Adreno’s close architectural similarities with the Xbox360 Xenos GPU the company can squeeze more out of it compared on Windows Phone 7 compared to Google on Android (there’s also the fact the Microsoft has total control over the API which is Direct3D Mobile).

When asked about current OpenGL ES 2.0 Adreno 205 benchmark results compared to the PowerVR SGX540 (see my bench here) I was told that Sony Ericsson’s Xepria Play is the Android handsets with the most up-to-date drivers so it would be interesting to re-run the test on it and see how the Adreno 205 finally stacks up against the competition with more mature drivers. Qualcomm was also showing the same MSM8660 development handset outpout 3D HD video to and HDTV too.