ARM Community: ARM Mali Shows Texture Compression Leadership at HPG Conference - ARM Community

The details of ARM’s Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression (ASTC) technology are about to be unveiled at the High Performance Graphics (HPG) conference in Paris, France. My colleague Tom Olson blogged about ASTC back in December, and since then our texture compression team has been busy refining the technology, ready for inclusion in upcoming ARM® Mali™ GPUs, and also improving the encoder.

At HPG, Tom will be presenting his paper entitled, predictably, “Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression”, as part of the session on texture and appearance on Wednesday 27 June 2012.

Tom will be explaining how ASTC manages to get such good image quality with unrivaled flexibility, across such a wide range of formats and bit rates, and how this extends naturally to its support for high dynamic range and 3D textures.

This quality advantage allows designers to use lower bit rates for their textures, lowering the cost of transmission and storage. More importantly, it also reduces memory bandwidth and consequently lowers energy consumption. So we’ve been able to achieve the miracle of doing more, better, with less energy.

If you get a chance to go along and see him, please do. I don’t want to steal his thunder, so I will follow up with a more detailed blog post after the conference.

For now, what I will say is that ASTC is a truly world-leading technology that will make a significant impact in the world of energy-efficient texture compression. Stay tuned to see how the magic happens.

Sean Ellis is part of the Technical Staff in ARM's Media Processing Division. He has been working with 3D graphics since 1988, including on ARM's original machine, the Archimedes. He was a key player in the specification of the Java Mobile 3D Graphics standards (M3G and M3G2) and is currently working to define the architecture of the next generation of ARM GPUs. He is also involved in patent work, helping to protect ARM's innovations in the multimedia arena.