ARM Community: Mali-T600 series - The new Nexus between Graphics and Compute - ARM Community

In my last blog I promised to have more opportunities to showcase ARM^® GPU technology. In fact, this year we had plenty of occasions to celebrate and we are expecting more than 100 million devices such as features phones, Smartphone, tablets as well as DTV and STB to be shipped with ARM Mali^TM Graphics Processing Units. But in the last three weeks something truly unique has happened, the time has come and we can take pleasure in the first consumer products based on the Graphics and GPU Compute Mali-T600 GPU family.

Google Chromebook, which was released nearly two weeks ago, was the first commercially available device powered by the Samsung Exynos 5 Dual processor. As Trina covered in her blog, together with dual core ARM Cortex^TM-A15 and quad ARM Mali-T604 this device has changed everything. Being the first Chromebook powered by ARM architecture it can not only run longer from the battery than others but also doesn’t require a fan, even when the CPU and GPU perform intensive workloads.

As if it wasn’t good enough, in the following week Samsung announced the Arndale board, a new community development platform designed around the same Exynos 5 Dual system-on-chip. What it means is that developers around the world can now access an affordable and powerful environment for producing high complexity mobile content by leveraging the graphics and compute capabilities of the Mali-T600 series whilst benefiting from the rich ecosystem around Mali GPUs. ARM Cortex-A15 and quad ARM Mali-T604 processors not only deliver remarkable graphics performance uplift, when compared to the previous generation SoCs, but also demonstrate the ARM leadership in GPU compute and graphics. They do so by enabling Full Profile OpenCL 1.1 and in the future OpenGL ES 3.0.

And finally this week, Google announced the new powerful Nexus 10 tablet with the same winning combination of ARM Cortex-A15 and ARM Mali-T604. This is the first tablet allowing the Google experience on the new version of Android JellyBean 4.2. With the 10 inch screen and 2560 × 1600 resolution we can now enjoy the highest pixel density of any tablet. The Mali Midgard GPU is an integral part of this completely new visual experience and its high filtrate throughput, bandwidth savings and energy efficiency enables the “buttery” Android user experience at such high resolution.

Mali-T604 includes native support for 64-bit, compliance to IEEE 754-2008 precision and built-in atomic operations making it the perfect fit for Renderscript a high performance computation Android API. Putting Renderscript Computation on Mali-T604 in the hands of Android developers enables use cases such as image processing and mathematical modelling to benefit from significant efficiency savings.

And we have only just started, with the second generation of Mali Midgard GPUs including Mali-T628 and Mali-T678 it is just getting better. ARM partners have already begun designing SoCs that will benefit not only from additional performance and features but more importantly from further bandwidth and power reductions.

After all, at ARM we care about performance density and energy efficiency and in every generation of our products we improve our architecture even further. So please make sure to get one of those new shiny Mali-T604 devices that will enable you with those completely new use cases. It really makes all of those late evenings fueled by coffee and pizza that our engineers put into our designs worthwhile.

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.