Qualcomm's Adreno 400 GPU to be unveiled in early 2014

Qualcomm has been hard at work making its new mobile GPU. Rumoured to be named the Adreno 400, it will undoubtedly be a big step up from the current-gen 330, which currently works with the Snapdragon 800 chip—one of the fastest mobile chips currently available. According to Fudzilla, the Adreno 400 is expected to show itself alongside Qualcomm’s next chip, which is slated for a CES 2014 unveiling in January.

While it’s no secret that a next-gen mobile GPU will have more horsepower than the current-gen ones, one of the most interesting pieces of information is that the 400 won’t support OpenCL. This will undoubtedly handicap quite a few developers, especially since the last couple of Android updates have brought in support for better implementation of OpenCL.

The Adreno 400 will be one of the most powerful mobile GPUs next year

Currently, the Adreno 330 goes toe-to-toe with Nvidia’s Tegra 4. It is capable of pushing out 3.6 Gigapixels a second, which makes it one of the fastest mobile GPUs out there. The 400 will very obviously beat the Tegra 4, but might meet its match when the Tegra 5, currently codenamed Logan, is shown off.

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There are quite a few new mobile GPUs that will be shown off in the coming months, including Nvidia’s Tegra 5, PowerVR’s 6-series, ARM’s Mali 700-series and Vivante’s mobile GPUs, and it will be quite interesting to watch all of these chips go head to head with each others in benchmarks and real-world tests.

The mobile GPU market is in an interesting position right now, with a bunch of different companies vying for control. It is in stark contrast to the PC GPU market, which is dominated by AMD and Nvidia.