Qualcomm: From Satellites to CDMA to Snapdragons | Hacker News Reader

Qualcomm: From Satellites to CDMA to Snapdragons

thehistoryofcomputing.net

The article forgot to mention that their Adreno GPUs were IP acquired from former ATI, now AMD (Adreno is an anagram of Radeon)

If you ever feel like you made a bad financial bet, remember that AMD nearly bankrupted itself by spending too much money on buying ATI in 2006, and in 2009 sold Quallcomm their Imageon (now Adreno) mobile GPU division they got from the ATI acquisition, exactly when the smartphone boom kicked off the mobile SoC gold rush that made Quallcomm so rich. It's like shooting yourself in both feet. Twice. I wonder if whoever was at the helm of AMD back then managed to find other jobs in the industry after that.

It was partially from their acquisition.

Adreno started by using the fixed function blocks from the Imageon acquisition from AMD but combined them with the programmable blocks of the Qualcomm Qshader GPU architecture.

I'm not sure how true that is given how closely the Adreno 2xx ISA matches Xenos

I was part of the GPU handheld IP group within AMD that was acquired by Qualcomm and remained in Qualcomm for several years after the acquisition.

You are correct about the Adreno 200 being a trimmed down version of the Xenos GPU from the XBox 360. That shipped before the acquisition by Qualcomm.

However, I can also confirm that the GP is right: Adreno 300, which is the first product that we shipped after the acquisition, combined the fixed-function blocks from AMD with the programmable shader processor (SP) from Qualcomm. That SP had a prececessor (QShader) which had never shipped commercially.

Overall, I think it is inaccurate to say that Adreno is basically AMD's IP. It was the combination of both teams, plus the people who had been previously acquired from Bitboys. This amalgamation of people led to a ton of internal conflict, eventually leading to the closure of the offices staffed by Bitboys and the departure of a bunch of other senior people.

Things are way better these days, or so I hear.

Ah I was always curious about this. Thanks for the history!

Oh man, the eDRAM on X360 makes so much more sense now. I always wondered why that was the case but I wasn't as close to the graphics side of things when I was working in gamedev.

GPUs are always something where people have... strong opinions about. That said having spent a bunch of time with the Adrenos they were pretty solid embedded GPUs and watching the generational leaps from 100/200/300/400 was a ton of fun. The GPU group over there at QC had some sharp people and were always great to work with(at least from my exposure).

Thank you for sharing these stories.

>This amalgamation of people led to a ton of internal conflict

This hits dangerously close to home, if I hadn't experienced this a thousand times.

It's a nice theory but I think it's the integrated Qualcomm modem that lets them peddle their rather mediocre ARM processors and GPU.

Unfortunately my memories of Qualcomm devices and technologies are a bit less fond.

At least when I was using Android devices, their CPU and GPU performance was always lagging, sometimes quite heavily, behind competitors. As far as I know, the main selling point was always the baseband part of their SoC designs, not the application processor. (Having both in a single SoC supposedly can save a lot of power and definitely does save money in many low and mid range phone designs.)

Their proprietary CDMA standards have been a source of frustration as a GSM phone user when traveling to some countries (although CDMA at the time seemed very innovative and was available before UMTS) as well.

Was this Krait or Kryo?

...this article betrays its age.

"Qualcomm has an ARM Architectural License and uses the ARM instruction set to create their own CPUs. The most recent incarnation is known as Krait."

Who remembers qualcomm for their email client?

Ah, the good old days of Eudora. I'd forgotten about it being a Qualcomm product.

Oh wow I read your comment and heard the do do do Da duh duh sound.

The source code is available from the Computer History Museum

https://computerhistory.org/blog/the-eudora-email-client-sou...

Really happy for this, most people don't know about qualcomm. It was quite fun exploring the old stories of phreaking and discovering what still worked post 00' on CDMA devices. To my surprise, everything was basically the same to an extent and there still exists a nice community for this.

The Mars helicopter Ingenuity also uses a commerical off the shelf snapdragon mobile processor (820 I believe).

wait do silicon based chips work in the temperature and pressure of the martian surface?

Yes. From what I gather you wouldn't use commercial grade chips, the standard epoxy encapsulation doesn't work well at crazy temperatures and pressures. Ceramic/metal packages are preferred.

See: https://www.ti.com/applications/industrial/aerospace-defense...

It's actually not crazy on Ingenuity: vacuum really isn't an issue for most chips, the epoxy packages are totally okay from 0-1atm. The temperatures are also kept benign - One of the advantages of being in a near vacuum of the Martian atmosphere is that heat transfer is very slow. Ingenuity keeps to a fairly narrow (-20 to 60C iirc) temperature range even without substantial power spent on heaters. It gets warm during a heat-soak event after flying, and on the cold side, it doesn't get below the temps allowed for the li-ion battery. Note that it isn't designed to survive a bad martian winter, though this is mostly due to decreased power generation rather than lower temperatures.

> Broadcom was growing into a behemoth. Many of their designs sent from stand-alone chips to being a small part of a SoC, or system on a chip. Suddenly, cross-licensing the ARM gave Qualcomm the ability to make full SoCs.

Surely the Broadcom and the ‘cross licensing’ are errors here?

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