We spoke to a chap who got poached from AMD by Qualcomm and now takes care of Adreno graphics.

Adreno is basically the Imageon mobile GPU, previously owned by ATI (AMD) and acquired by Qualcomm for a lousy $65 million. Adreno, or Imageon is something that will help Qualcomm to stay in the graphics game.

Qualcomm claims that its soon to ship dual-core Scorpion CPU powered by Adreno 220 graphics offers about two times more GPU performance than Tegra 2. Adreno 220 powered dual-core Scorpion chips should end up in 60 devices in the first half of 2011, something that will put a lot of pressure of Nvidia’s graphically slower Tegra 2.

It will be fun to compare the two, but we still have to see a phone powered by dual-core Scorpion, but everything indicates that this will happen this year.

Tegra 2 phones and tablets should ship in March, and some tablets are already available, powered by Android 2.2 and based on Tegra 2. It looks like Qualcomm can win this round, but Tegra 3 looks to be coming in August and Qualcomm said that its dual- and quad-core 28 parts should come in early 2012.