ARM Community: Mali leads graphics in the DTV space - ARM Community

The smart TV market has gone from concept to mass production over the last two years and 2012 saw an explosion of smart TVs being launched at CES which were summarised in Nizar Romdhane’s blog. The key products on show clearly demonstrated the pace of innovation in the DTV space, and one of the main features making these smart TVs popular is the improved user experience which has been enabled through enhanced user interfaces. Consumers are now able to intuitively interact with their DTV as they do with any other consumer product today, such as smartphones and tablets. The ability to play games without a console whilst accessing a wider range of content in a seamless way are all made possible due to the high-performance graphics that are now an integral part of the smart TV solution.

The applications processors now at the heart of most smart TVs are more often than not using the ARM® Cortex™-A9 processor combined with the ARM Mali™-400 MP graphics processor. Actually, this combination will ship in over 70% of graphics enabled DTVs this year as the popularity of smart TVs continues to grow. The combination of Cortex-A9 and Mali-400 MP technology is opening up the range of activities that can be done with the big screen and the way users can interact including web browsing, social networking interaction, as well as voice and gesture control.

There are a wide range of ARM Partners and OEMs now shipping smart TVs including Samsung and LG who are both building processors for their own DTVs. Chinese DTV OEMs such as Skyworth and HiSense have all announced GPU enabled DTVs this year and with strong silicon partnerships in place with companies like MediaTek, MStar and Amlogic, ARM is very well positioned to continue growing our Graphics business significantly in this rapidly developing segment.


So why has Mali beaten the competition and been so successful in this area? The answer is through partnerships as well as having industry leading graphics technology. Mali-400 leads the industry in terms of performance density and enables partners to achieve the maximum performance with the smallest area of silicon, thereby reducing the cost to buy and cost to power a device offering a highly energy efficient solution. With the wealth of Mali based smart TVs in the market, a vibrant ecosystem has been established supporting applications, games, user interfaces, and gesture control designed for the DTV. This continues to expand as more developers understand the potential of having dedicated graphics performance available to them with the size of a DTV screen. The DTV ecosystem is no longer working in isolation but is benefiting from the extensive ecosystem around Mali based smartphones and tablets enabling users to have a consistent user experience across DTV, tablet and smartphone. User interfaces have not historically been the most compelling aspect of a TV viewing but that is changing with the smart TV era. User interfaces are the key interaction point for the user and these are experiencing a major overhaul with exciting 3D UIs being shipped today.




Graphics, however, does not work in isolation but as part of a richer system, and by being paired up with the Cortex-A9 the Mali-400 MP is able to work more closely with the CPU. Since both products are designed by ARM, developers are also able to benefit through the availability of key development tools such as the DS-5^TM toolchain. The DS-5 tools enable developers to analyse the performance of their application across both CPU and GPU tasks at the one time, from the one toolchain. This brings with it a greater understanding of how developers can optimise their end applications by maximising the use of the available processing resources, whether it is CPU or GPU. Also, both products offer a range of performance points through the support of multicore implementations from single core Cortex-A9 and Mali-400 MP implementations up to quad core versions offering scalability with software compatibility. This enables OEMs to maximise their software reuse and speed up the time to market for ranges of products not just single products. This will be key to enable the wider proliferation of smart TVs in the market.

So what is next for DTVs? Resolutions will continue to increase user interfaces and services will become more advanced making use of the processing power now available in our homes. The ARM Mali team continues to work with market leading partners, and future product announcements will ensure the experience across the DTV space continues to get even more exciting with each generation of smart TVs.

Look out for Kris Hong’s blog on more details of where the DTV market is going next.

Kevin Smith, VP of Strategic Marketing, ARM, joined ARM in 2001 and has held various commercial and marketing roles within Sales, Segment Marketing and the Processor and System Design divisions. Kevin is currently VP of Strategic Marketing for the Media Processing team and has responsibility for driving the commercial and product strategy for Graphics.