Qualcomm: From Satellites to CDMA to Snapdragons
thehistoryofcomputing.net
Qualcomm: From Satellites to CDMA to Snapdragons
1–10 of 21 posts
Re: Qualcomm: From Satellites to CDMA to Snapdragons
#2The article forgot to mention that their Adreno GPUs were IP acquired from former ATI, now AMD (Adreno is an anagram of Radeon)
If you ever feel like you made a bad financial bet, remember that AMD nearly bankrupted itself by spending too much money on buying ATI in 2006, and in 2009 sold Quallcomm their Imageon (now Adreno) mobile GPU division they got from the ATI acquisition, exactly when the smartphone boom kicked off the mobile SoC gold rush that made Quallcomm so rich. It's like shooting yourself in both feet. Twice. I wonder if whoever was at the helm of AMD back then managed to find other jobs in the industry after that.
Re: Qualcomm: From Satellites to CDMA to Snapdragons
#3The article forgot to mention that their Adreno GPUs were IP acquired from former ATI, now AMD (Adreno is an anagram of Radeon) If you ever feel like you made a bad financial bet, remember that AMD nearly bankrupted itself by spending too much money on buying ATI in 2006, and in 2009 sold Quallcomm their Imageon (now Adreno) mobile GPU division they got from the ATI acquisition, exactly when the smartphone boom kicke…
It was partially from their acquisition.
Adreno started by using the fixed function blocks from the Imageon acquisition from AMD but combined them with the programmable blocks of the Qualcomm Qshader GPU architecture.
Re: Qualcomm: From Satellites to CDMA to Snapdragons
#4The Mars helicopter Ingenuity also uses a commerical off the shelf snapdragon mobile processor (820 I believe).
Re: Qualcomm: From Satellites to CDMA to Snapdragons
#5The article forgot to mention that their Adreno GPUs were IP acquired from former ATI, now AMD (Adreno is an anagram of Radeon) If you ever feel like you made a bad financial bet, remember that AMD nearly bankrupted itself by spending too much money on buying ATI in 2006, and in 2009 sold Quallcomm their Imageon (now Adreno) mobile GPU division they got from the ATI acquisition, exactly when the smartphone boom kicke…
It was partially from their acquisition. Adreno started by using the fixed function blocks from the Imageon acquisition from AMD but combined them with the programmable blocks of the Qualcomm Qshader GPU architecture.
I'm not sure how true that is given how closely the Adreno 2xx ISA matches Xenos
Re: Qualcomm: From Satellites to CDMA to Snapdragons
#6Who remembers qualcomm for their email client?
Re: Qualcomm: From Satellites to CDMA to Snapdragons
#7Who remembers qualcomm for their email client?
Ah, the good old days of Eudora. I'd forgotten about it being a Qualcomm product.
Re: Qualcomm: From Satellites to CDMA to Snapdragons
#8The article forgot to mention that their Adreno GPUs were IP acquired from former ATI, now AMD (Adreno is an anagram of Radeon) If you ever feel like you made a bad financial bet, remember that AMD nearly bankrupted itself by spending too much money on buying ATI in 2006, and in 2009 sold Quallcomm their Imageon (now Adreno) mobile GPU division they got from the ATI acquisition, exactly when the smartphone boom kicke…
It's a nice theory but I think it's the integrated Qualcomm modem that lets them peddle their rather mediocre ARM processors and GPU.
Re: Qualcomm: From Satellites to CDMA to Snapdragons
#9> Broadcom was growing into a behemoth. Many of their designs sent from stand-alone chips to being a small part of a SoC, or system on a chip. Suddenly, cross-licensing the ARM gave Qualcomm the ability to make full SoCs.
Surely the Broadcom and the ‘cross licensing’ are errors here?
Re: Qualcomm: From Satellites to CDMA to Snapdragons
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was partially from their acquisition. Adreno started by using the fixed function blocks from the Imageon acquisition from AMD but combined them with the programmable blocks of the Qualcomm Qshader GPU architecture.
I'm not sure how true that is given how closely the Adreno 2xx ISA matches Xenos
I was part of the GPU handheld IP group within AMD that was acquired by Qualcomm and remained in Qualcomm for several years after the acquisition.
You are correct about the Adreno 200 being a trimmed down version of the Xenos GPU from the XBox 360. That shipped before the acquisition by Qualcomm.
However, I can also confirm that the GP is right: Adreno 300, which is the first product that we shipped after the acquisition, combined the fixed-function blocks from AMD with the programmable shader processor (SP) from Qualcomm. That SP had a prececessor (QShader) which had never shipped commercially.
Overall, I think it is inaccurate to say that Adreno is basically AMD's IP. It was the combination of both teams, plus the people who had been previously acquired from Bitboys. This amalgamation of people led to a ton of internal conflict, eventually leading to the closure of the offices staffed by Bitboys and the departure of a bunch of other senior people.
Things are way better these days, or so I hear.