ARM Community: Mali GPUs: 2012 the momentum starts, 2013 the growth accelerates - ARM Community

You will have seen over the recent months the momentum behind Mali™ GPU continues to grow significantly and Mali GPUs are now shipping in over 200 different OEM products. Based on this increased adoption of Mali in OEM products, ARM partners will have shipped over 180 million Mali based SoCs in 2012 which is a considerable growth versus 2011, when less than 50 million Mali based devices were shipped into the market.

Mali-400 based devices can be found in over 70% of smartTVs, over 50% of all Android tablets and in one in five of every Android smartphone that have been shipped in 2012, and this breadth of devices now puts Mali GPUs into the hands of more and more consumers. Mali-400 was joined this summer by the release of the Mali-450 expanding the range of Mali graphics solutions available. It offers the leading performance density in the industry whilst enabling an increased scalability that will bring exciting user experiences to an even wider range of consumer devices. First devices based on Mali-450 are expected to ship this year.

The Google Nexus 10 and the Samsung Chromebook, both using Samsung Exynos 5 dual, are the first products on the market to benefit from the performance potential of a dual Cortex-A15 and quad Mali-T604 combination. The release of these products also means the first GPU Compute capable GPUs are now shipping in mobile devices. The significance of this from a graphics perspective is that Mali-T604 is enabled for Full Profile GPU Compute and the recent announcement of Mali-T604 reaching Full Profile OpenCL conformance establishes a leadership position that our partners will now be able to leverage into other devices.


Now there are Mali-T604 devices available in the market, the ecosystem around GPU Compute for mobile devices is also growing rapidly and many of our ecosystem partners are actively exploring the possibilities GPU Compute can open up for them for both existing use cases as well as driving innovation in a whole range of new content and use cases that will come to consumer products during 2013.

Overall, 2012 was been an incredible year for Mali graphics with our OEM, Silicon and Ecosystem partners all helping to drive ARM’s graphics technology into a diverse range of consumer products, and to look back here is a short video looking at the last 6 months in the world of Mali GPUs.


So as we look forward, what can you expect to see from Mali GPUs in 2013? You will continue to see Mali GPUs driving forward graphics in an increasingly wider range of end devices as well as a wider number of partners enabling growth in emerging markets including BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China). GPU Compute, using Mali-T600 series, will continue to expand and become more prevalent in actual devices including both mobile devices as well as smartTVs. Enabling use cases such as personalization of the viewing experience for multiple viewers - incorporating features such as facial recognition and tailoring the experience to the person and their preferences. Also opening up the potential of market driving graphics standards, such as Full Profile OpenCL, Renderscript and OpenGL ES 3.0, to a wider audience - enhancing further the user experience of Mali GPU enabled devices. This in conjunction with Mali-450 MP based smartTVs and mobile devices will continue to solidify Mali GPUs performance density leadership. Looks like 2013 is going to be at least as exciting as 2012 if not more!

Kevin Smith, VP of Strategic Marketing, ARM, joined ARM in 2001 and has held various commercial and marketing roles within Sales, Segment Marketing and the Processor and System Design divisions. Kevin is currently VP of Strategic Marketing for the Media Processing team and has responsibility for driving the commercial and product strategy for Graphics.