ARM Community: "The GPU king is doing well, long live Mali-450 MP" - ARM Community

Almost a year ago, I had the pleasure of covering Samsung Galaxy SII and the graphics processor that has set the highest benchmark score amongst all smartphones. With over 48 million devices shipped in 2011, Mali has settled in the top positions on the GLBenchmark website. This week we have unveiled Mali^TM-450 MP, a new graphics core that doubles the performance of the award winning Mali-400 MP.

Recently all eyes were on Samsung Mobile Unpacked 2012 event in London where Samsung Galaxy SIII was launched. The performance results of the international version of this most anticipated Android device revealed a “new graphics king”. As we all know, ARM is the market leader in providing technology that enables a variety of mobile devices to combine exceptional performance with the long battery life and Mali-400 MP was designed to meet that demand.

The family of Mali Graphics Processing Units is the obvious choice for SoCs providing high performance graphics for today’s superphones but also future proof of GPU solutions for the mass market. Platforms including the recently announced Rockchip RK3066 and Spreadtrum SC8810 are great illustrations of how Mali GPUs can deliver exceptional performance in cost-effective bandwidth and power budgets. The Mali-450 MP takes performance density to new levels and is designed to maximize reuse of the available resources during the graphics operation therefore minimising memory and energy consumption.



Multi-processor scalable graphics performance
The Mali-450 MP extends the highly successful family of GPUs based on the Mali Utgard architecture by supporting scalability up to eight pixel processors whilst also increasing the vertex processing throughput. This together with improvements in the architectural efficiency enables support for a wider range of requirements over multiple form factors.



Efficient energy and bandwidth usage
The Mali-450 MP has been optimized further with focus on energy and bandwidth savings. Compact size, improved ultra-low power architecture as well as reduced memory bandwidth together with the increased latency tolerance results in lower costs of manufacturing and minimal energy consumption.

High performance and image quality
Linear performance scaling and focus on maximizing processing efficiency, even when rendering at four times Full Scene Anti-Aliasing (4xFSAA), ensures superior image quality and provides an ideal solution for 2K and 4K screen resolutions.

Common software platform reduces costs and time-to-market
Mali software DDK enables seamless transition to Mali-450 MP by maintaining one driver and application stack for the current and future product portfolio. Additionally Mali GPU multicore scaling is completely transparent to software developers, lowering cost of hardware integration whilst maximizing reuse of existing software investment.

Two roadmaps address a range of products performance
The Mali-450 MP and its successors have a long life in a front of them, the flexibility and scalability will enable next generations of products in the mid-range mobile and home segments. In fact by the end of the year we are expecting to see more than 100 million handsets, tablets as well as DTV and Set-top-boxes with Mali GPUs, delivering market leading graphics performance.

As Jem described in his blog in our next generation GPU and Compute products line we are taking the same approach and utilise the power of Heterogeneous computing in an energy-efficient manner. By joining the Heterogeneous System Architecture Foundation we take an active part in collaborating over hardware and software specifications and in our Mali-T600 family targeted at math intensive user cases we have improved architectural efficiency even further. With the coherency between multiple Mali graphics cores as well as between the GPU and CPU, energy expensive operations can be avoided by keeping transactions on chip and minimizing accesses to the external memory. This enables better reuse of the existing resources and contributes to large power and bandwidth savings while delivering Compute and Graphics performance with no compromises.

Next week at the 4th Home Application Seminar in Shenzhen we will show more facts about Mali momentum and our future roadmaps. So please stay tuned for more highlights on Mali-450 MP and expect other opportunities like to this one to showcase ARM GPU technology.




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.