Way back around 2008, AMD was bleeding money after its acquisition of ATI. They wanted to divest of their Handheld division, which was the business unit that was producing chips for smartphones. From what I heard through the grapevine, Qualcomm was interested only in some part of it, particularly the GPU IP, but AMD wanted to sell the whole thing, and eventually lowered the price enough that Qualcomm sealed the deal. I was just a nobody, so take that with a grain of salt.
At the time the purchase was finalized in 2009, the GPU was a miniaturized version of the Xenos GPU from the XBox 360; all the basic parts were there, but the tile memory (GMem) was colocated with the rest of the GPU instead of being in a separate chip. That's what was marketed as the Adreno 200 GPU. It was a pretty quirky shader architecture where each clock issued two instructions: a SIMD vec4, and a scalar op, in VLIW manner, not superscalar. A lot of the time utilization was poor because the compiler couldn't find a way to pack two useful instructions in that manner. But I digress.
Back to the Qualcomm acquisition. It was a very tense period for the workers. Our salaries at AMD had been frozen for a while, and Qualcomm refused to bump our pay. I wish we, the workers, had built a common front to negotiate, but we didn't. As part of the contract, AMD was not allowed to hire us back, so most of us went along and got swallowed into Qualcomm reluctantly.
Qualcomm had been working on their own GPU design for a number of years, largely through people they had poached from S3 Graphics, IIRC. Anyhow, they had not been able to actually ship their own IP and were still entirely reliant on AMD's GPU designs, so the acquisition made a lot of sense to them. Qualcomm's latest GPU IP was called QShader, and it featured a remarkably sane scalar-based unified architecture; it was a very significant improvement in programmability.
After the acquisition there was a slow process of merging QShader with AMD's Xenos derivative, with the goal of producing a hybrid that would eventually be marketed as Adreno 300. In essence, they took the fixed-function blocks from Xenos, from its command processor to its texture units, while the shading processor was brought in from QShader. That first Adreno 300 (codenamed "Oxili") was a momumental effort from all involved, and while it had some teething problems, it was the foundation for all future Adreno GPUs in Snapdragon chips. And, hey, it even made it to Mars! [0].
Twenty years later and Adreno GPUs still ship with that Xenos-style tile-based rendering architecture. I can't believe that Andy Gruber, the chief architect behind it, doesn't have a Wikipedia page.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingenuity_(helicopter) [1]