Qualcomm Adreno 305: Features, Performance, Feedback

What is Qualcomm Adreno 305, know a few. And even those who almost guess what this thing is, do not always understand what it is for. Since the moment when smartphones broke into our life, we had to quickly find ways to develop a reduced system. So there were mobile processors and small graphics accelerators.

What is it?

So, the graphics processor, which is not only in the PC, but also "sat down" in our mobile devices, perfectly copes with modern tasks. Now most often occur:

• 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 Adreno 305, it is worth to understand what parameters are characterized by such processors.

Options

So, in order to understand what kind of graphics accelerator we have before us and say something about its performance, we need to look at three parameters:

• The number of triangles per second.
• The number of pixels per second.
• The number of operations with a floating point.

Of course, only specialists can analyze this information. The average user will not have much to say about these parameters. Therefore, let's move directly to our mobile model Adreno 305.

Qualcomm

This company has developed not one mobile processor. So, many smartphones can boast of having one of the models of the Snapdragon family. The ruler is designed for smartphones and tablets, works with ARM architecture and communication modules. It is these mobile systems on the chip that store the chipsets, to which the hero of our review belongs.

In general, Snapdragon is represented by two series, the first of which obtained the indices S1 / S2 / S3 / S4, and the second one - 2xx / 4xx / 6xx / 8xx. It is to the second series that Adreno 305 belongs. He "hid" in the Snapdragon 400 family and was represented by a dozen modifications.

Snapdragon 400

In general, anyone who starts to understand the models of processors, chipsets, cores, platforms and everything else, immediately notice the catch. This family is represented not by one model. There are several modifications with different architectures, cores and frequencies. But common for each of them is the graph of the 305th core. It is in all, and hence the resolution of the display is always the same - 1280x800.

New

The first Adreno 305 model received the number 8225. The chipset was made using a 28 nm process technology 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 links: EDGE, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, GSM, HSPA + and GPRS. This option has settled in many models of devices, 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 in the characteristics of Adreno 305. Only the frequency of the processor 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 his mass production began. The list of devices is replenished with four models of Nokia Lumia, as well as the chipset was used in models of smartphones Huawei, HTC and Acer. The technical component again changes insignificantly. The frequency is returned to 1.2 GHz, while the list of supporting wireless networks is updated: DC-HSPA + and LTE. And memory technology is processed to LPDDR2 and LPDDR3.

New platform

The following modifications of the chipset led to drastic changes. So, the quad-core Cortex-A7 is replaced with a dual-core Krait 200, which had a frequency of 1.2-1.4 GHz. Data appears on the cache volume at the first level of 32 KB, on the second - 1 MB. Update the memory technology. In the last four modifications, the processor changes to Krait 300 and works at a frequency of 1700 MHz. At the same time each time the list of devices that work with the chipset is increased by 3-5 models.

Comparison

Comparison of Adreno 305 with Adreno 225 is the most frequent. This is because the older version is a continuation of the younger version. In fact, the 305th model is an update of the 225th. It first appeared in Snapdragon S4 Pro, but the greatest success was achieved in the family Snapdragon 400. The difference in the novelty is its modernity. It supports more new technologies, easily copes with the API, Direct3D 9.3, OpenGL ES 3.0 and CL 1.2.

Testing

The performance of the Adreno 305 can only be checked using tests. Of course, a lot depends on which platform the chipset is on and with which processor it works in pair. The core clock speed reaches 450 MHz. The FLOPS parameter is in the range of 0.02 and indicates the computing power of the GPU processor.

0.8 GPixel / s is the pixel speed. The parameter is responsible for the number of pixels that are displayed on the display per second. As mentioned earlier, the model supports the 9.3-version of DirectX, which significantly improves the graphics in games. The OpenCL 1.1 version is a technology that allows some software to use a graphics accelerator for non-graphic purposes.

The process technology of the core is 28 nm. In comparison with the already modern versions, this is a big indicator, but by 2013 these were the revolutionary dimensions of the chipset.

Features

Adreno 305 - this is a good video processor, which became popular in 2013. It was at that time that mobile devices quickly became equipped with this model. It received a unified shader architecture. On average, the frequency of the video processor reaches 266 MHz, but in fact, there have been known uplifts up to 450 MHz.

The chipset has one core. The amount of used memory reaches 256 MB. Inside, there are two pixel shaders, one geometry processor and a vertex shader. The performance reaches 98 million triangles per second and 2.5 billion pixels over 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 receives a Z-buffer with a bit width of 24 bits. Now more than 50 smartphones and a dozen tablets work with this graphics accelerator. Most of the gadgets are discontinued.

Reviews

Qualcomm has been working with Adreno graphics processors for a long time. The first versions began to appear back in 2009 and already then took possession of 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. Sometimes frequency fluctuations are noticeable.

Still there were users who have smartphones with Adreno 305. Reviews this video processor received in a small amount. This is due to the fact that this is part of the mobile device, so it's the smartphone that receives feedback, 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 with anything special. The processors with this core worked well, thanks to the technology of lean power consumption they kept the device autonomous for a long time.

The main disadvantage of buying such a device was that the user could pay attention to the Snapdragon 400, find the specifications on the Internet, learn everything and purchase it. But in fact, it turned out that the chipset is somewhat weaker, testing in some cases prove to be a failure. Such problems were caused by the fact that under the brief Snapdragon 400, several modifications could often be implied, in which, although there was Adreno 305, other indicators could vary significantly.

In general, the schedule was not bad. She did not pull fashionable toys, but at low settings coped with almost all projects from the "Play Store." The main drawback of graphics and processors from Qualcomm to this day is considered overheating. Therefore, now many manufacturers of mobile devices abandon the products of this company and prefer Mali.