What is Qualcomm Adreno 305, few know. And even those who approximately guess what this thing is, do not always understand what it is for. From the moment smartphones broke into our lives, I had to quickly look for ways to develop a reduced system. So there were mobile processors and small graphics accelerators.
What is it?
So, the graphics processor, which is located not only in the PC, but also “stuck” in our mobile devices, copes with modern tasks perfectly. Now most often found:
- PowerVR
- Mali;
- Adreno;
- GeForce ULP
These are the most popular companies that have already proven stable and productive work in different smartphones and tablets. Before considering the Adreno 305, it is worth understanding what parameters are characterized by such processors.
Options
So, to understand what the graphics accelerator is in front of us, and to say something about its performance, you need to look at three parameters:
- The number of triangles per second.
- The number of pixels per second.
- The number of floating point operations.
Of course, only all specialists can analyze this information. The average user will have little to say the numbers on these parameters. Therefore, we will immediately go directly to our mobile model Adreno 305.
Qualcomm
This company has developed more than one mobile processor. So, many smartphones boast the presence of one of the models of the Snapdragon family. The line is designed for smartphones and tablets, works with ARM architecture and communication modules. It is these mobile systems on a chip that store the chipsets in themselves, to which the hero of our review belongs.
In general, Snapdragon is represented by two series, the first of which received the S1 / S2 / S3 / S4 indices, and the second - 2xx / 4xx / 6xx / 8xx. Adreno 305 belongs to the second series. It “hid” in the Snapdragon 400 family and was presented by a dozen modifications.
Snapdragon 400
In general, those who begin to understand the models of processors, chipsets, cores, platforms and everything else will immediately notice a catch. This family is represented by more than one model. There are several modifications with different architectures, cores and frequencies. But common to each of them is the graphics of the 305th core. It is in all, which means that the display resolution is always the same - 1280x800.
New
The first model “Adreno” 305 received the number 8225. The chipset was made according to the 28 nm manufacturing process with low power consumption technology. The processor was Cortex-A7 on four cores with a frequency of 1200 MHz. The graphics accelerator supported a set of wireless connections: EDGE, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, GSM, HSPA + and GPRS. This option has settled in many device models, including Samsung Galaxy S5, S3 and Tab 4, Sony Xperia M2 and Microsoft Lumia 640 XL.
The following modification practically did not bring any changes to the Adreno 305 specifications. Only the processor frequency changed from 1.2 GHz to 1.4 GHz, and the accelerator went to the Samsung Galaxy S3 SS.
Changes
The third version of the chipset became known in the fourth quarter of 2013. It was then that its mass release began. The list of devices has replenished with four Nokia Lumia models , and the chipset also began to be used in models of smartphones Huawei, HTC and Acer. The technical component changes slightly again. The frequency of 1.2 GHz is returned, while the list of supporting wireless networks is updated: DC-HSPA + and LTE. And the memory technology is being processed on LPDDR2 and LPDDR3.
New platform
The following modifications to the chipset led to dramatic changes. So, the quad-core Cortex-A7 is replaced by a dual-core Krait 200, which had a frequency of 1.2-1.4 GHz. Data on the cache volume appears at the first level of 32 kB, at the second - 1 MB. Update memory technology. In the last four versions, the processor changes to Krait 300 and operates at a frequency of 1700 MHz. At the same time, each time the list of devices that work with the chipset increases by 3-5 models.
Comparison
Comparison of Adreno 305 with Adreno 225 is the most common. This is because the older version is a continuation of the younger. In fact, the 305th model is an update of the 225th. It first appeared in the Snapdragon S4 Pro, but it was most successful in the Snapdragon 400 family. The difference is new in its present. It supports a large number of new technologies, easily copes with APIs, Direct3D 9.3, OpenGL ES 3.0 and CL 1.2.
Testing
The performance of Adreno 305 can only be verified using tests. Of course, a lot depends on which platform the chipset is placed on and which processor it is paired with. The core clock frequency reaches 450 MHz. The FLOPS parameter is within 0.02 and indicates the processing power of the GPU processor.
0.8 GPixel / s is the pixel rate. The parameter is responsible for the number of pixels that are displayed per second. As mentioned earlier, the model supports the 9.3 version of DirectX, which significantly improves the graphics in games. OpenCL 1.1 is a technology that enables some software to use a graphics accelerator for non-graphical purposes.
The core process technology is 28 nm. Compared to the already modern versions, this is a big indicator, but by 2013 it was the revolutionary dimensions of the chipset.
Features
Adreno 305 is a good video processor that became popular in 2013. It was at that time that mobile devices quickly began to be equipped with this model. She got a unified shader architecture. On average, the frequency of the video processor reaches 266 MHz, but in fact, raising to as much as 450 MHz was known.
The chipset has one core. The amount of used memory reaches 256 MB. Inside there are two pixel processing shaders, one geometric processor and one vertex shader. Performance reaches 98 million triangles per second and 2.5 billion pixels in the same time.
Adreno 305 can perform hardware tessellation, works with full-screen anti-aliasing, splits three-dimensional scenes into tiles, creates hardware lighting, works with alpha-blending, and also received a buffer Z with a resolution of 24 bits. Now more than 50 smartphones and dozens of tablets work with this graphics accelerator. Most gadgets are discontinued.
Reviews
Qualcomm has been working with Adreno GPUs for a very long time. The first options began to appear back in 2009 and already then captured the market and the attention of users. Now there are seven processors with this graphics accelerator. In general, they practically do not differ from each other. Frequency fluctuations are sometimes noticeable.
There are still users who have smartphones with Adreno 305. This video processor received reviews in small numbers. This is also due to the fact that this is an integral part of a mobile device, therefore it is the smartphone that receives reviews, and not its individual elements.
It is known that the 2013 models that received this chipset belonged to the middle price segment and showed stable performance, which did not stand out for anything special. The processors with this core worked well, thanks to the lean energy consumption technology, they remained autonomous for a long time.
The main drawback of buying such a device was that the user could pay attention to the Snapdragon 400, find specifications on the Internet, study everything and purchase it. But in reality it turned out that the chipset is somewhat weaker, testing in some cases is a failure. Such problems were caused by the fact that a brief Snapdragon 400 could often mean several modifications, in which, although there was an Adreno 305, other indicators could vary significantly.
In general, the graphics were not bad. She did not pull fashionable toys, but at low settings she coped with almost all the projects from the "Play Market". The main drawback of graphics and processors from Qualcomm is still considered overheating. Therefore, now many manufacturers of mobile devices are abandoning the products of this company and prefer Mali.