
Adreno

Adreno is a series of graphics processing unit (GPU) semiconductor intellectual property cores developed by Qualcomm and used in many of their SoCs.
History.
Adreno (an anagram of AMD's graphic card brand "Radeon") started out as Qualcomm's inhouse brand of graphics technologies, and was used in their mobile chipset products. Early Adreno models included the Adreno 100 and 110, which had 2D graphics acceleration and limited multimedia capabilities. At the time, 3D graphics on mobile platforms were commonly handled using software-based rendering engines, which limited their performance. With growing demand for more advanced multimedia and 3D graphics capabilities, Qualcomm licensed the Imageon IP from AMD, in order to add hardware-accelerated 3D capabilities to their mobile products. Further collaboration with AMD resulted in the development of the Adreno 200, released in 2008, which was integrated into the first Snapdragon SoC. In January 2009, AMD sold their entire Imageon handheld device graphics division to Qualcomm.
Technical details.
Variants.
The company offers Adreno GPUs in various types, as a component of their Snapdragon SoCs:
Operating system support.
There are proprietary drivers for the Linux-based mobile operating system Android available from Qualcomm themselves.
Historically the only way to have GPU support on non-Android Linux was with the libhybris wrapper.
Linux and Mesa supports the Adreno 200/300/400/500 series of GPUs with a driver called "codice_1." Freedreno allows fully open-source graphics on devices like the 96Boards Dragonboard 410c and Nexus 7 (2013).