ARM Community: Mali served with frozen dessert - ARM Community

As you are probably aware, there has been a lot of excitement about the Android 4.0 “Ice Cream Sandwich” release that was finally made on the 14th November. As someone at ARM mentioned, it’s almost like Christmas, considering it has been nearly a year since it officially happened last time. Here at ARM’s Media Processing Division we are particularly thrilled because with every new Android revision we are seeing more of the visual computing use cases for Mali Graphics Hardware.

Mali has a growing ecosystem on Android and has been an integral part of its sweets, chocolates, pastries and biscuits since the early days of Donut. Eclair based MIDs were shipping with Mali-200 almost two years ago and with Froyo, Surface Flinger composition became accelerated out-of-the-box on our GPUs. On malideveloper.com we have published the source code that enables composition to be accelerated without any additional overheads and fully integrates our drivers with the Android graphics memory manager. With the award winning Galaxy S2 as well as Galaxy Note, HTC Sensation z710t and several other devices running Gingerbread, Mali-400 MP has hit a sweet spot of super-smooth user experience and quickly became “king of the Android GPU hill”. Recently, Mali based tablets such as Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus and Galaxy Tab 7.7, demonstrate the new Honeycomb UI re-designed for larger screens and higher resolutions.

So what’s new in Ice Cream Sandwich and how does Mali achieve and sustain the constant quest for more of a visually compelling and tastier user experience? Android 4.0 includes an even more refined and evolved UI that allows users to navigate with simple, intuitive gestures and makes interactions more engaging and interesting. New components and capabilities improve the performance applications and enable better utilization of the underlying OpenGL® ES hardware. Ice Cream Sandwich also provides a direct and more efficient path for low-level streaming of multimedia, enabling face recognition, live effects and transforming video through the GPU. Our fantastic engineering team ensured that Mali partners received preliminary software support for all those features just a few days after Ice Cream Sandwich was released and below you can see a Android 4.0 User Interface and games accelerated by Mali.



What’s coming for the next dessert? As Roberto covered in his blog, RenderScript is the next breakthrough technology in Android that makes us die-hard GPU fanatics even more excited. Originally introduced in Honeycomb, it offers a native level API for 3D graphics and compute. What it means is that in the future revisions Android will enable Mali to accelerate not only graphics but also computational tasks. With the approach we have taken on the Midgard architecture we can support Renderscript Compute in addition to the OpenCL™ full profile. Mali-T604 and the recently announced Mali-T658 are tailored for this job and include double-precision FP64 and full IEEE-754-2008 floating-point support. As Steve explained in his blog, these features are essential in order to enhance the user experience in the future and GPUs are becoming a key component of energy-efficient heterogeneous compute platforms running Android. Developers and users will be able to take a full advantage of hundreds of GFLOPS of compute resources and unlock the potential of the next generation Android Market applications. All of that is yet to come with Mali and another sugary Android version. I'm not sure I can wait until dessert time.

Jakub Lamik, Graphics Product Manager, Media Processing Division, ARM. Jakub has spent several years working in the semiconductor industry but still remembers days when he used to type J followed by a double quote to load his favourite game on his ZX Spectrum Plus. On one rainy day, he had to give up his beloved system programming to lead the design of low power 3D graphics accelerators, which he believes is really about “not rendering pixels”. He soon became fascinated with visual computing and nowadays is a product manager looking after ARM Mali GPUs.