Qualcomm rumored to announce Adreno Turbo to take on Huawei's GPU Turbo

Qualcomm China has teased an image of some upcoming improvements to the Snapdragon chips on its official Weibo page. Nothing much is revealed but the image notes characteristics such as 'Faster', 'Smoother', 'Cooler', 'Smarter', and 'Longer' of the Snapdragon SoC. Piecing together all of them, we can infer that they could be a reference to 'Adreno Turbo' (probable name) — a Qualcomm implementation similar to Huawei's GPU Turbo.

Not many details are being revealed in this teaser but if one refers to Huawei's GPU Turbo, similar features were touted there as well. While the exact underlying mechanism is still unclear, GPU Turbo claims to offer a 60% performance boost along with a 30% reduction in power consumption for graphic intensive workloads such as games. Beta testing for GPU Turbo is underway and a list of Huawei and Honor phones slated to get this update was recently released. 

If Qualcomm's teaser is indeed pointing to a similar implementation, it is not yet known how the chip maker intends to enable 'Adreno Turbo' on existing handsets. Will it be a software update that enables some sort of low level graphic framework change or does it slightly overclock speeds of the faster cores? Currently gamer-focused phones such as the Razer Phone, Xiaomi Black Shark, and Asus ROG Phone use an overclocked Snapdragon 845 along with their own gaming related enhancements.

Also, will 'Adreno Turbo' be an implementation on existing Snapdragon SoCs or is it something to watch out for in the Snapdragon 855? The teaser says it will be revealed on July 25 so we should be getting more information tomorrow. We will keep you posted so stay tuned.

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