[Exclusive] Qualcomm Adreno GPU Shipments Exceed $2.5 Billion – The Adreno Story

Today, Qualcomm during ChinaJoy 2020 pre-event called “Choose Snapdragon, Happily Win” shared its investment and achievements in the mobile industry. In the event, Qualcomm announced a jaw-dropping statistics. Since the beginning of research and development in 2005,  the cumulative shipments of Qualcomm Adreno GPU graphics chips have exceeded $2.5 billion USD .

It looks like AMD might be regretting the decision they made back in 2006.

From A $65 Million To A Whooping $2.5 Billion Revenue – The Qualcomm Adreno Story

Let’s turn on the highlight reel and move back to the past. In October 2006, AMD spent a huge sum of US$5.4 billion to acquire the Japenese ATI, making it the only semiconductor manufacturer in the industry that has three core components of high-performance CPU, high-performance GPU, and high-performance chips. However, because of this purchase, the company also went into large debt. Things couldn’t get worse, when, at the same time Intel and NVIDIA were provided them competition.

As a last option, AMD sold the original ATI handheld business to Qualcomm in 2009 for a mere $65 million USD.

Surprisingly, before the company sold ATI, the ATI Imageon series graphics processors were very successful and were widely adopted by various smartphone products in 2009. We believe that if AMD hadn’t sold the company, it would have been able to lead the smartphone industry.

Interestingly, the  Adreno GPU shipments mentioned by Qualcomm here also include the shipments of ATI Imageon processors in the four years before the acquisition .

Moreover, Qualcomm has done quite an amazing job of retaining itself in the lead mobile industry over the past decade with competitions from Hisilicon, MediaTek, and Samsung. Qualcomm SoCs are featured inside most Android phones including Xiaomi, OPPO, Redmi, Samsung, Realme, Vivo, and more. The company provides all sorts of SoCs ranging from entry-level performance to the flagship-level performance.

As of now (July 29, 2020), Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 865 and Plus are being featured inside most of the flagship-level Android phones and are the most Android SoCs of 2020. The Snapdragon 765 based on the world’s first 5nm SoC process is also expected to be announced at the end of this year.