Adreno 320: New Qualcomm Chip makes LightField computations possible on Smartphones

Qualcomm recently presented their new Adreno 320 GPU, which could help bring LightField technology to phones – at least according to Tim Leland, Qualcomm’s Director of Adreno product management.
What sets the Adreno 320 apart from other GPUs (graphical processing units), is its support for general purpose processing and OpenCL. That means, it’s “much easier to program computationally intensive, parallel computing-type use cases”. In comparison, current GPUs are “more limited” in their speed when, for example, refocussing a LightField image.

The Adreno 320 GPU is part of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon S4 Pro chip family, which should arrive in devices “before the end of the year”.

While this is certainly exciting for all those hoping to get a LightField enabled smartphone anytime soon, it’s only one of several factors that will be necessary. One of the bigger obstacles is creating an optical LightField lens system small enough to fit into a smartphone.

via