Qualcomm's new Adreno 530 GPU won't be something you'll find in any phone until next year, but nonetheless the newer, better, faster GPU powering the upcoming Snapdragon 820 chipset was detailed (well, lightly detailed) at SIGGRAPH 2015 this week. Qualcomm also confirmed that Snapdragon 820 devices will be available starting in the first half of 2016 - all but ruling out the chip in rumored Nexus devices launching this fall (unless, of course, they're not launching until next year).

While the rest of Snapdragon 820 is still largely under wraps, the new Adreno 530 was described to us in a short presentation, with the major figures to take away being a 40% increase in speed over the Adreno 430, along with a 40% decrease in power consumption under the same workload. The latter is obviously of great interest for battery life during GPU intensive activities like gaming or video and image editing. Of course, just how these gains will play out in real world battery life and performance remains to be seen. Qualcomm claims some of the gains are from an all-new GPU power manager, but a good chunk of that is also likely derived from the smaller FinFET process being used across the 820 SoC.

Qualcomm claims the newest Adreno is a significant overhaul compared to the 400 series chips, with improvements across the board on the graphics and image processing stacks, as well in how the GPU is able to work with the CPU in more and more meaningful ways. The abilities of the new Spectra image signal processor (only in the Adreno 530) and related software advances were a key point during Qualcomm's presentation, with the company claiming a number of improvements to image processing across multiple fronts.

Enhanced noise reduction ready for the newest generation of mobile image sensors (which the 820 can support at up to 25MP or dual 13MP sensors simultaneously), "zig zag" video HDR capture support, more intelligent correction of lens and sensor aberrations, and increased autofocus performance are all potential benefits. Should phone OEMs choose to take advantage of them, of course.

The Adreno 530 has the kind of standards support you'd expect of a high-end GPU in 2016 - Miracast 4K30, HDMI 2.0 at 4K60, the new Vulkan graphics API slated for support in Android, OpenGL ES 3.1, and Open CL 2.0.

Other details were light, though Qualcomm has never been particularly forthcoming about its GPU hardware technology and designs. You can see more information in the slides below, as well as in the press release. As to the titular Adreno 510? All we were told is that it won't feature the fancy new Spectra ISP, and that it will be in the upcoming Snapdragon 620 and 618 chips.