The
Snapdragon 820 (and the 618 and 620, when they're released) will be the first of
Qualcomm’s chips to come with the next-generation Adreno 500-series GPUs. The 820 will ship with the high-end Adreno 530, while the 618 and 620 will both include the Adreno 510.
All 500-series GPUs will support the same APIs. This includes OpenGL ES 3.1 with the
Android Extension Pack introduced in Lollipop (and Qualcomm tells us that OpenGL ES 3.2 support will follow on platforms that support it) and, when it’s ready, the low-overhead Vulkan API. Qualcomm told us that Adreno 400-series GPUs will be able to support Vulkan, too, since they support OpenGL ES 3.1, but that the 500-series would be the company’s first GPUs built with Vulkan in mind.
On the GPGPU end, support for both OpenCL 2.0 and Renderscript is included. OpenCL 2.0 lets the CPU and GPU work from the same memory pool, and to that end the Adreno 500 GPUs also support 64-bit virtual memory addressing—the Kryo core is 64-bit, too, so this will be important for OpenCL 2.0 support while running 64-bit Android or other 64-bit OSes.
