ARM Community: ARM Mali-T658 GPU Arrives at the Japan Technical Symposium - ARM Community

If you follow Jem Davies’s blog, then you may have noticed that at ARM TechCon™, he made a cryptic comment about an “exciting new Mali graphics product launch” news coming. Wait no longer! ARM just launched the new multicore Mali-T658 GPU here in Tokyo, Japan and we’ll be telling you all about it during a series of Technical Symposia around Asia in the coming weeks.

The Midgard architecture
Following on from the Mali-T604 GPU launched in 2010, the Mali-T658 is the latest and most powerful Mali Midgard GPU to date. I should just explain that Midgard is the name of the GPU architecture that was first introduced with such success in the Mali-T604. Midgard features three types of pipeline, each optimised for different tasks – arithmetic, load/store and texturing; we call it the ‘tri-pipe’. This means that a GPU based on the Midgard tri-pipe architecture is not only great at complex graphics, but it’s also outstanding at GPU Compute. While I’m on the subject, I should mention that Midgard supports all your favourite graphics APIs (Khronos™ OpenGL® ES, OpenVG™, Microsoft® DirectX® 11) and Compute APIs (Khronos OpenCL™, Google® RenderScript™ compute and Microsoft DirectCompute®). And not just any OpenCL I might add – Full Profile OpenCL is supported thanks to the IEEE 754-2008 floating point capability built into the GPU hardware.

The New Mali-T658 GPU
“Okay, I get Midgard”, I hear you say, “but what’s so special about the Mali-T658?”

Simple. It’s all about higher performance – twice as many shader cores and double the arithmetic pipelines per core. For graphics this means that the Mali-T658 GPU offers up to 10 times the performance of the Mali-400 MP GPU that is widely used in mainstream consumer devices such as the Samsung Galaxy S II. On the compute side, Mali-T658 provides four times the processing power of Mali-T604 – that’s hundreds of GFLOPS on a mobile GPU. Mali-T658 also offers a range of performance and API support, exceeding that of all currently available embedded GPUs. Amazing stuff don’t you think?



Software Compatibility
One of the cool things about the Midgard architecture is the Job Manager – a clever little block in the GPU that takes the weight off the CPU by loading the data that the GPU needs autonomously, without requiring a big load on the CPU. The Job Manager issues jobs across the pipelines in the multicores depending on how many are fitted or powered up and down. This means that the differences between the Mali-T658 and the Mali-T604 are neatly hidden, and software doesn’t need to worry about it. Neat, isn’t it?

Why do I need all this performance?
One of the many axioms in the world of graphics is that you can never, ever have enough processing power. Those clever artistic folks who create content will always find exciting new ways to use up the fill-rate, triangle-rate and GFLOPS that you have so faithfully provided in the latest technology. This is of course great because it means that consumer products are constantly improving to provide more and more exciting user-experiences. For us folks at ARM it poses some interesting engineering challenges – how to meet the demand for ever more powerful GPUs in a power-sensitive mobile environment.

We’re definitely up for the challenge – and our graphics experts already have plenty of new ideas in the works beyond Mali-T658. So do keep a close eye on the world of Mali GPUs – there is lots of exciting news still to come.

Join us for our webinar, “Harnessing the power and flexibility of the Mali Midgard architecture” on 15 November at 10am PST. You can register here.

Impressed? Do you know what you’ll be doing with all that extra performance? Please tell us!

Steve Steele, Senior Product Manager, Media Processing Division, ARM, Steve joined ARM in 2001 and has managed a number of technologies including ARM’s Java program, software products, data engine (DSP), PV fast modelling and video IP. Steve is currently a product manager in the Media Processing Division team with special responsibility for the Mali-T604 and Mali-T658 GPUs. Previously Steve was at Thales Optronics where he managed a major project to design and build an EO reconnaissance system for the Royal Air Force. Before that Steve worked at Vitec where his experience covered embedded hardware and software design, system design and product marketing for robotics in the broadcast television industry. Steve holds a BSc(Hons) in Physics with Physical Electronics from the University of Bath and an MBA from Nottingham Business School.