Monday, February 27, 2012

Qualcomm announces Snapdragon S4 "Pro" chip with Adreno 320 graphics

Qualcomm announces Snapdragon S4 Qualcomm has just confirmed the Snapdragon S4 “Pro” which adds amazing graphics with Adreno 3
20 graphical core, building on top of the powerful 28nm Qualcom MSM8960 with Krait processor.

The new S4 “Pro” chip patches the weakest spot of the first MSM8960 chips, which in the rush to the market only included Adreno 225 graphics. The new GPU will allow for higher resolution displays and bring a four-fold improvement in visuals. It will support the latest gaming engines from Unity (games on it include the Samurai series and Rocket Bunnies on iOS) and Epic (the Unreal Engine, powering titles like Gears of War).

Adreno 320 will support hardware acceleration of rendering features like instancing and multiple render targets, and come with new APIs with OpenCL.

The S4 “Pro” chip release date is set for the second half of 2012 and Qualcomm underlined that it is optimized for upcoming Windows 8 devices, supporting full hardware acceleration for the platform.