ARM Community: Mali-T600 Series Completing the ARM 64-bit System Story - ARM Community

Today ARM announced the ARM^® Cortex™-A50 processor series, which include ARMs first low-power 64-bit implementations of the ARMv8 architecture. These highly anticipated products bring with them not only an enhanced 32-bit CPU architecture but also open up the wider range of opportunities that 64-bit architectures offer for high performance energy efficient devices. Over recent years we have seen a large number of partners benefit from the combination of the Cortex CPU processors and the ARM Mali^TM graphics processors (GPU). The partnering of the Cortex-A9 and Mali-400 MP solidified this with a wide range of devices benefiting from the performance possible from this combination, ranging from smartphones and tablets to smartTVs and media boxes. Since both the CPU and GPU are multicore implementations they offer a wide range of performance points with one software stack. This enables partners to address a wider range of devices with one software investment, which can quicken their time to market, reduce their costs and maximize the return on their investments - vital in many of these markets.

The second generation of the Cortex/Mali pairing - the Cortex-A15 and Mali-T604 is appearing now in consumer devices from Google (Samsung Chromebook and Nexus 10 Tablet) based on the Samsung Exynos 5250 which enables, like its predecessors, market leading devices in a wide range of markets .

Mobile devices are now becoming more and more the primary compute platform for users which require these platforms to handle more complex tasks. The Mali-T604 is the first member of the Mali-T600 series, now containing five members, which offer the ability to perform GPU Computing tasks on the GPU. This builds on the big.LITTLE concept of running tasks in the most efficient place across CPUs. GPU Compute brings the GPU resources into this mix by enabling some tasks, previously done on the CPU to move onto the GPU, enabling another level of efficiency for the system. As tasks become more complex and the content handled by these devices continues to increase in complexity, working smarter across the system becomes more vital. A key component is a coherent memory system enabled by the ARM Corelink 400 series (CCI-400) across the Cortex CPU and Mali GPU series. It enables a significant boost in performance and reduction in time to market as low overhead data transfers between CPU and GPU increase in importance.

The combination of the Cortex-A50 and the Mali-T600 series brings to market the highest performance CPU/GPU pairing targeting energy efficient devices. The Mali-T600 series is already able to support 64-bit addressing and offers IEEE 754 compliant 64-bit floating point arithmetic; so really is “64-bit system” ready. This opens up the potential for developers to get started earlier on the GPU elements with real silicon. The Mali-T600 series of products have all been designed with support for the latest ARMv8 architecture for both 32-bit(AArch32) and 64-bit mode(AArch64). This close functional matching will become even more important as GPU Computing opens up more exciting use cases over the coming years, and ARM will continue to focus on delivering leading processor and system IP that silicon vendors can rapidly deploy. Keep watching...

Ian Smythe, Director of Marketing - Media Processing Division, ARM, After dabbling in sonar and other DSP stuff, he went on to spend over a decade in the semiconductor industry. Ian's wife calls him a geek, but the tech guys at ARM really know he's the marketing guy - but we all know that visual processing is where the cool stuff is. Ian's challenge is to ensure that everyone uses ARM Mali technology for their latest and greatest multimedia products.