ARM Community: ARM POP IP for Mali GPUs making your mobile phone last even longer - ARM Community

In the graphics arena we spend a lot of time talking about the challenges of supporting the increasing content complexity and enhanced user experience demand for mobile devices. The actual GPU technology is only part of the story - the ability to manufacture this technology in a way that maximizes the performance, whilst optimizing the energy efficiency is a continuous balance and is set to become even more important as SoCs become more complex.

ARM several years ago identified the need to optimize the physical IP to match the underlying process technology with the processor being manufactured. The result of this was the ARM® POP™ IP products – these are core-hardening acceleration technology to enable the production of the best ARM processor implementations, in the shortest time to market. They provide the ability to optimize for different requirements – maximum performance, lowest power or a combination of the two. It gives the flexibility to designers to match not only the underlying SoC design to the device requirements, but also how it is manufactured. What it also provides is a level of predictability to the solutions manufactured. Partners who have adopted the POP IP for ARM Cortex CPUs have already seen benefits ranging from quicker time to market to more energy efficient end products.

As more and more SoCs now contain both CPU and GPU technology the need to support POP IP focused on the graphics technologies has increased. ARM last week announced a POP IP solution for Mali-T628 and Mali-T678 on TSMC 28nm HPM process technology – bringing the benefits that have been experienced in the Cortex CPU area to Mali GPUs. The specific benefits this POP IP can bring is up to 27%higher frequency, 24% lower area and 19% lower power compared to implementations not using the POP IP. This customized physical IP development seeks to enable the most efficient GPU implementations at process geometries of 28nm.

The POP IP for Mali GPUs brings together three key elements to enable these improvements. It builds on the proven Artisan physical IP standard cell logic and memory cache that have already been tuned and used for ARM processors and our foundry partners' technology. As well as including additional cells that are designed to address the specific needs of Mali GPUs. In addition to this the POP IP provides benchmarking to document the exact conditions and results that are need to address a range of configurations and design targets. Finally it provides detailed floor plans, scripts, design utilities to help our partners to achieve the same results. This full POP IP for Mali-T628 and Mali-T678 brings together ARM’s extensive knowledge built up from designing physical IP for mobile SoCs over many years, with a wide variety of partners, into one comprehensive package. It enables Mali licensees to take advantage of the breadth of implementation knowledge built up by ARM over the last 20 years.

The Mali GPUs go into a wide variety of end devices ranging from entry level Smartphone up to high-performance smart TVs and not all these devices have the same requirements with respect to power consumption and performance targets. The optimized physical IP provided by the POP IP enables our partners to explore the options and choices to come up with the right balance for graphics performance, total power and area for their end application. The POP IP increases the range of frequencies that the Mali GPUs can support. By increasing the core frequency enables tasks to be run quicker and then the graphics core can be turned off until it is needed again, removing any standby leakage. This “run fast then stop” technique can reduce the standby power by making the overall system more efficient, enabling even further improvements to battery life without a compromise in performance.

The benefits the POP IP brings to the wider development and OEM community is in reducing the cost of getting SoCs to market first time whilst minimizing the risks involved in the implementation of new graphics technologies in TSMC 28HPM process technologies – helping to bring visually stunning devices to market quicker.

Trina Watt, Director of Channel Marketing, Media Processing Division, ARM. I like to think of myself as a “geek in marketers clothing”. Gadgets and technology have been a passion for me as long I can remember – from dismantling my first radio when I was about 8 to now running around regularly with 3 phones, a tablet and laptop to feed my tech thirst. I started in the tech industry nearly 20 years ago in Motorola and I have never ventured far from it. I am currently focused on promoting the visually exciting Mali graphics processors. I get to work with a wide range of partners who are creating the innovative devices of the future. For a geek it doesn’t get much better than that!