ARM Community: Mali Maintains its Leadership Position – the best just keeps getting better! - ARM Community

The last few days have been a busy time in the graphics world with the great and the good collecting in sunny LA for SIGGRAPH 2012. The announcements kicked off early Monday morning with Khronos announcing an update to the market leading OpenGL ES standard – with the latest edition OpenGL ES 3.0 bringing new levels of 3D graphics performance to give an even better user experience.

Also included in the announcement was news of a texture compression extension for the OpenGL ES standard - it has the grand title of Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression, slickly shortened to ASTC. The groundwork for the innovative ASTC technology was created by ARM and added to by key Khronos members and ARM partners. But you’re probably wondering why you should care about data compression techniques! Well it brings two main benefits to you the user: the quality of graphics can be improved and the battery life of your device can be extended – smaller data files, less memory, lower power consumption. That means more time to play AAA games – it’s simple!

I guess you would expect a leading mobile graphics technology company like ARM to be heavily involved in the formation of these new standards – and we’re showing our commitment with a same day announcement of new GPU products that will support OpenGL ES 3.0 and ASTC. We’ve introduced additions to the Mali-T600 Series - Mali-T624, Mali-T628 and Mali-T678 - and they bring up to 50% performance improvements over the original Mali-T600 products. And all this is coming to a smartphone, tablet or DTV near you in 2013.

As a market leader in CPU technologies, ARM has led the way in CPUs with multicore and big.LITTLE technologies and has now built on this knowledge to further optimize mobile platforms. The original Mali-T600 was the first Mali product to make GPU compute available alongside high-performance graphics. CPU plus GPU, it’s a winning combination; by running maths intensive tasks on the GPU you can free up the CPU and save energy all at the same time. ARM strongly believes in putting the right task on the right processor - whether it is a CPU or a GPU. ARM’s commitment can be seen in our recent announcement of submission for Full Profile OpenCL conformance. It really is OpenCL without compromise for mobile, tablet and DTV devices.

So here at SIGGRAPH 2012 there are lots of hot new announcements and products from ARM, matched only by the sizzling temperatures outside. To see what your smartphones and tablets will be able to do by the end of 2012 come to the ARM booth at SIGGRAPH to see the Mali-T604 in the flesh.

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.