News

New Qualcomm Snapdragon family contains Xbox 360 graphics

Xenos in the palm of your hand

New Qualcomm Snapdragon family contains Xbox 360 graphics
|

This year's Mobile World Congress was the year of the multi-cores, with all the major chip manufacturers coming out to speak about their latest ground-breaking products designed to power the mobile devices of the future.

Qualcomm was no exception, demonstrating the new members of the Snapdragon family on its stand with incredible 3D games and video (both active shutter and your normal flat display) outputting from handsets at an impressively high resolution.

What's in the box?

Talking to Pocket Gamer, Qualcomm's Tim Leland, staff product manager for graphics, revealed that the next crop of chips from the American company - codename Krait - includes technology from the ATI Xenos card that's been used to power the likes of Call of Duty and Gears of War on the Xbox 360.

This development comes from Qualcomm's acquisition of ATI's mobile graphics department two years ago, which has helped the manufacturer to significantly ramp up its research and development into faster graphic technology for mobile chipsets.

Yet despite the large boost in performance from the previous generation of Snapdragon, the latest processors will consume 75 percent less power, thanks to the ability to intelligently disable parts of the system when not needed by the host device.

And that's despite a promised 12-fold performance increase.

Will Wilson
Will Wilson
Will's obsession with gaming started off with sketching Laser Squad levels on pads of paper, but recently grew into violently shouting "Tango Down!" at random strangers on the street. He now directs that positive energy into his writing (due in no small part to a binding court order).