Qualcomm’s Adreno X2 GPU

Integrated GPUs have become a crucial component in recent laptop chips, thanks to a push for better graphics performance in ultraportable devices. AMD and Intel have both launched impressive iGPU implementations in recent years. Qualcomm’s laptop push needs a powerful iGPU in this landscape, and that’s where the Snapdragon X2 Elite’s Adreno X2-90 enters the picture.Adreno X2 expands on the foundation set by the Snapdragon X Elite’s Adreno X1, but brings an enhanced architecture that aims for higher throughput. Shader Processors (SPs) act as the basic building block for Qualcomm’s Adreno GPUs. Each SP contains a pair of Micro Shader Processor Texture Processor (uSPTPs), which have execution units, register files, and private texture caches. At a higher level, Qualcomm groups pairs of SPs into slices. A fully enabled X2-90 part has eight SPs grouped into four slices, compared to six SPs in three slices on Adreno X1. Qualcomm also scaled up clock speeds from 1.5 to 1.85 GHz. A larger,…