Performance characterization of mobile GP-GPUs

As smartphones and tablets have become more sophisticated, they now include General Purpose Graphics Processing Units (GP GPUs) that can be used for computation beyond driving the high-resolution screens. To use them effectively, the programmer needs to have a clear sense of their microarchitecture, which in some cases is hidden by the manufacturer. In this paper we unearth key microarchitectural parameters of the Qualcomm Adreno 320 and 420 GP GPUs, present in one of the key SoCs in the industry, the Snapdragon series of chips.