Question about "Adreno" GPU's like in Tablets, Fire TV etc..

[futurefields]

Do the Adreno GPU's like what's in the Amazon Fire TV use things like SPU's, ROP's etc like standard PC GPU's? I was having trouble finding any kind of specs on these GPU's. All I could find is that they are either 64 or 96 ALU or something like that. Not really sure what ALU is.

 

[Yuriman]

AFAIK the Adreno 320 is the first GPU with unified shaders, so it's the first that can really be compared to modern desktop/laptop GPUs. The size and content of a compute unit isn't cross-comparable with different architectures though, so by and large, the best we can do is compare performance.

 

[ViRGE]

Qualcomm isn't very forthcoming on specifications. They have ROPs, shader clusters, and the like. But I don't think any of the counts or the layout of the architecture has been published. Yuriman's description isn't all that far off from the entirety of everything we know.

 

[TreVader]

The Adreno320/330/420 are all tile-based rendering GPUs. All the PowerVR chipsets are too. They do have pixel shaders and ROPs but they use a totally different rending process to dextop GPUs.





Tile based rendering doesn't require calculations for anything that isn't visible (geometry, etc), so it can save performance.

 

[futurefields]

Qualcomm isn't very forthcoming on specifications. They have ROPs, shader clusters, and the like. But I don't think any of the counts or the layout of the architecture has been published. Yuriman's description isn't all that far off from the entirety of everything we know.

Yes the specs are quite cryptic and i dont like this trend I want to see how things really compare, but theres so much marketing fluff in this mobile hardware.

 

[monstercameron]

reverse engineered information
http://freedreno.github.io/
couldnt find specifics though.