ARM Community: Multimedia - ARM Community

As you are probably aware, there has been a lot of excitement about the Android 4.0 “Ice Cream Sandwich” release that was finally made on the 14th November. As someone at ARM mentioned, it’s almost like Christmas, considering it has been nearly a year since it officially happened last time. Here at ARM’s Media Processing Division we are particularly thrilled because with every new Android revision we are seeing more of the visual computing use cases for Mali Graphics Hardware.

Mali has a growing ecosystem on Android and has been an integral part of its sweets, chocolates, pastries and biscuits since the early days of Donut. ...

Just a day ago we’ve lifted the veil off the ARM® Mali™-T658, the second Mali GPU based on the Midgard architecture that we launched a year ago. It’s been brewing in our labs next to the Mali-T604 and already has key leading licensees, but until now hasn’t enjoyed the public presence of its sibling. Now they are both ready to power the leading end-user devices of 2012! Yes you hear right - expect to see them both in stores next year.

So how does the Mali-T658 complement the Mali-T604? By showing off some of the versatility of the Midgard architecture it brings in a compute punch of up to 350 GFLOPS and over 5GP...

I’ve just come back from ARM TechCon 2011 and it was a pretty special time for ARM: on the first day, Simon Segars, EVP and GM of the Physical IP Division at ARM, opened things by talking about the full range of physical IP that ARM now has, and the Processor Optimisation Packages (POPs) that make ARM’s great CPUs even faster and lower power (we’re looking at ways to add the same value for our Mali GPUs in the future). After that, we had Nandan Nayampally’s talks on ARM Cortex-A7, and the big.LITTLE processing ...

The ARM® Mali™ Ecosystem today has a broad community of developers and Partners who have created visually-compelling applications for Android™-based platforms using Mali GPUs. The Samsung Galaxy S2, the best Android smartphone in the market today, is showing how our Partners can develop high-end games and stunning user interfaces, creating an unparalleled user experience.

ARM has developed a strategy to provide the best AR solutions by working across the Augmented Reality (AR) value chain with key Partners.

Augmented Reality is one area that greatly benefits from platforms which provide high-performance CPU plus GPU solutions within a low-power profile, as AR applications require responsive image tracking, 3D graphics and a sustained battery life to make the technology viable.

The “Augmented City”, jointly developed by ARM and ...

As graphics processor hardware now supports a number of different floating point data formats, it is important to understand how to select an appropriate format for your calculations, and why the choice is important. Even the simplest of operations benefit greatly from a little thought. Here is an instructive example that we recently came across.

Animating Shaders

If you are creating an animated shader in OpenGL ES, you will need to tell it the time. The obvious way to do this is to create a uniform variable called, let’s say, animation_time, and use it to modify some aspect of the object we are drawing, such as its color, position, or texture. Let us look at some complications that can occur.

Here is a very simple animated pixel shader that uses the time to pulse a red light repeatedly:

uniform mediump float animation_time; gl_FragColor = vec3(fract(animation_time), 0.0, 0.0);

The fract function returns the fractional part of the animation_time value, which gives us a sawtooth-like ramp over time. This is placed in the red component of the fragment color, so that the object appears to be repeatedly pulsing red.

We pass ...

Many times on my travels through the world of embedded GPUs I have come across someone asking “How easy is it to port my game to Mali™?” Well.....actually it’s not difficult at all, and this is reflected in the ARM® Mali™ Ecosystem. Let’s start by looking at the Ecosystem and its growth. Having now reached a massive half a million activations a day, Android is where it’s at! Especially now the Samsung Galaxy S2 has hit the market. The S2 is a dual core ARM® ...

As promised, I gave a keynote speech at AMD’s Fusion Developer Summit last week, and it gained quite a lot of attention. There is a video of my speech here and the slides are attached at the bottom of this blog. Please take a look.

In my speech I set out the background - that Moore’s Law will continue, but the effects of it won’t give us as much of a frequency uplift and power reduction as we have been used to. We will have to use the additional transistors more cleverly, through the use of domain-specific processors and heterogeneous computing. We will make use of GPUs to perform the right sort of computation, and utilize coherency (as described in my colleague Bruce Mathewson’s blog), to reduce the cost of offload and increase th...

Can you think back to a time before you owned a full color, touchscreen smartphone that allows you to navigate easily to your emails, calendar and favorite games by tapping and sliding on a graphically rich interface? Technology moves fast and with devices now being so user-friendly and intuitive, consumers are becoming rapidly accustomed to having so much information and entertainment at their fingertips – so much so that we take these devices very much for granted. The capabilities of smartphones, tablets and a range of other consumer devices have advanced so much, it is good to sometimes take a moment to really appreciate how much they now do for us.

Today’s connected consumer wants a seamless, connected user experience from one device to the next and we can no longer live without our smartphones, tablets, DTVs and automotive devices – for communication, social networking, entertainment and global navigation. ...

Last week several ARM Partners were on hand to showcase their latest connected ARM Cortex-A9 and Mali-400 products at the China Content Broadcasting Network Exhibition (CCBN). This is China's only international exhibition for broadcast, cable and satellite technology and since its first show in 1993, CCBN has become one of the largest exhibitions in Asia.



There were several highlights at the show from triple play platforms to Android based set-top-box (STB) / iTVs to 3D gaming and stereoscopic devices.

Trident demonstrated their Cortex-A9 Apollo/Shiner SoC family, the PNX8400, whic...

Things have now wound down at the Moscone Center after a week of the Game Developers Conference (GDC). We’ve been catching up on what’s new, what’s cool and who’s who in the world of gaming, and after a hectic five days we’ve packed our bags and headed home.

It was a busy week, but what were the highlights? Well, for us at ARM, the rise of stereoscopic gaming was a hot topic and with our own Stereoscopic Space Racer game ‘TrueForce’ on show, we were really encouraged to see that.

The developments around gaming engines also caught our eye. Scaleform were showing their custom engine for rendering flash effectively on the GPU – it really works, it’s fast, and it makes the creation of UIs for games, in addition to UIs for applets, really easy.

The guys from Unity were also here in force, with their game engine now enabling developers to easi...

In the first blog of this series, I claimed that as a GPU performance metric, triangles per second (aka TPS or triangle rate) is a chocolate teapot – i.e. utterly and completely useless – and talked about the difficulty of getting a consistent definition of the metric. (Without such a definition, you can’t compare triangle rate numbers from different vendors.) I also gave some technical background on how GPUs draw triangles. In this installment, I’ll talk about how GPU vendors exploit the definition problem to claim enormous triangle rates, while actually telling you nothing about the performance of the GPU. Finally, I’ll explain why, even if you were able to measure an honest triangle rate, you wouldn’t want to.

How to draw a gazillion triangles per second
OK, so you’re a struggling GPU vendor who wants to claim “N gazillion triangles per second”. It doesn’t m...

The practice of characterizing GPU performance in terms of triangle rate (triangles per second) has largely died out in the world of desktop graphics. Unfortunately, it continues to linger in the mobile graphics community. It is time to put a stop to it. There are three things wrong with it: first, it is ill-defined, making it impossible to compare numbers reported by different GPU vendors; second, it forces otherwise honest GPU vendors (not to mention unscrupulous ones) to mislead their customers, by measuring triangle rate under wildly unrealistic conditions; and third, if you do manage to address those problems and measure a well-defined, “honest” triangle rate, it is useless for any conceivable purpose. In this two-part blog, I’ll explain each of these points in detail, with digressions on how GPUs work, engineering trash-talk, and the relevance of chocolate teapots.

Measuring Graphics Performance
We’ve been thinking a lot lately about graphics performance and how to measure it. Our latest graphics core, the recently announced ARM Mali -T6...

On the heels of CES 2011, where ARM products were everywhere from handsets, smartphones, tablets, DTVs and STBs, as well as Microsoft’s announcement to support Windows on ARM , comes the latest announcement from Sony Computer Entertainment on its next generation portable entertainment system, codename NGP.

It uses a very high performance, energy efficient quad core ARM ...

John Carmack, interviewed in Arstechnica, said graphics processors such as the just-launched ARM Mali-T604 must address more than 32 bits-worth (4 Gbytes) of memory. Mobile downloadable apps are currently limited to 2 Gbytes, which cramps his style: on the desktop they are already much bigger. Consumer devices ship today with more than 512 MB DRAM and 16 GB of Flash, and Moore's law tells us they will cross the 4 Gbyte limit just after the first Mali-T604-enabled devices start shipping. Games engine programmers also want ...

So how did we do it? How did we create the coolest new GPU and architecture? Well, a few people have asked me this recently, so I thought I’d pull together all my stories, videos and blogs into one place (or at least the ones I can mention publicly).

Recently we had The Travelling Salesman stop by on his epic journey around the Nordic start-up scene and I gave him a short interview on our story from founding a tech company right up to being acquired by ARM. You can find the video from his visit below and his blog entry. And no I don’t usually wear sunglasses around the office...

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In case you missed the start of this discussion, my blog CPUs Have Been Doing GPU Computing Badly for Years started a dialog with Gary Smith who responded with Sub-Optimal Processing. Here is my response.

****er’s Law (name changed to protect the guilty)
It used to be said that the embedded space was about 7 years behind the desktop in the sense that technological changes tended to appear in (what was then) mainstream computing seven years before the embedded and mobile markets, but in many ways that isn’t true now. If we look at the innovations in OpenGL ES as compared to OpenGL for example, I think we can see that we’re at least on par in the graphics space. Where I think we’re wel...

TrueForce is a spaceship racing and precision game set in an asteroid belt in a distant galaxy. The goal is to race through the track as quickly as possible while collecting point tokens and power-ups, and avoiding crashing into megatons of...

It’s an exciting time to be involved with graphics processing as the industry undergoes yet more rapid change with the ever increasing performance demands to meet the expectations of the “eye-candy” focussed consumer and extending capabilities of the hardware and the software to meet those raised expectations. The recent introduction of OpenCL 1.1 by Khronos has opened the realm of visual computing onto an ever wider portfolio of devices and we at ARM are certainly part of the forefront of that. Follow some of the ARM team’s recent Open CL debate in Tom Olsson’s blog Why OpenCL Will Be in Your Smartphone in 2014 and Jem Davies’ response GPU Computing, the OpenCL debates and performance measurement.

The ARM Technology Conference (Techcon) on November 9-11 in the Santa Clara Convention Center down in Silicon Valley is the place where the ...

Recently, a lot of airline miles have been flown between my team and ARM partners to engage in conversations about the latest and future uses of GPUs. Mostly, I have been discussing our graphics roadmap which I still can’t tell you about publicly, but I also got a chance to see some of the latest cool demos on our current GPUs. I also got a chance to hear from our partners – about the slew of consumer products that are coming out soon based on our technology, and about the things they are doing with our GPUs. These partners, a fantastic collection of the most important companies in our industry, really are doing it all: printers, PNDs, digital still cameras, digital TV, set-top-box, automotive, mobile computing, and ...

Recently we released a major update to the Linux drivers for the Mali-200 and Mali-400 MP GPUs. Like many software projects we time-box our driver development, with two major releases each year. This release (r2p0) contains a bunch of exciting new features including Android support, full SMP support, performance optimizations and some important EGL extensions. We'll talk about some of these in future blog posts, but for today I wanted to tell you about the other big change we made for r2p0: we've started to release parts of the driver stack under an open source license.

People who get excited about software licenses are not necessarily the people you invite to a dinner party for their sparkling conversation and witty repartee. In fact the terms "exciting" and "software license" are used together about as often as the words "glamorous" and "garden shed". Not very often at all. But despite that I'm going to admit that I t...

Last week the 37th SIGGRAPH conference was held in Los Angeles. It’s the annual gathering of computer graphics professionals from all the disciplines that the field touches. Given the current global economy, it was a smaller show than in the past. I sadly expected that, but was pleasantly surprised that it was a much better show than I had expected.

Colors and meshes – my take on the cerebral part of the conference
I had the luxury of just attending the conference this year (I’ve presented courses in 12 of the last 13 shows, as well as helping to organize several of the conferences along the way), and found myself gravitating to discussions of color theory, shaders, and geometry and meshes.

The first course I attended discussed computing lighting with an eye towards real-time effects for games, and showed that the lighting model we’ve used in ...

The telecom and IT industries have for decades made much of technology convergence. Convergence of wireless and terrestrial. Convergence of voice and data. And most recently, convergence of mobile and desktop computing.

Mobile-desktop convergence has led to new form factors, like netbooks and now the iPad, offering intriguing hybrids of mostly existing capabilities. So far, it has created new categories of devices, without eliminating laptops and handsets. True convergence would mean fewer gadgets in users’ lives, not simply introducing new ones.

The explosive growth of smartphones and accompanying applications, increasingly deployed on ARM Cortex™ processors, finally promises to deliver convergence. Today’s smartphones, especially handsets built on Android, offer new options for worker productivity beyond voice, texting, and email. But pocket-size smartphones still limit full productivity due to small screens & keyboards.

Earlier th...

Automotive applications evolution continues to accelerate driven by consumer demands. The automotive industry is seeing extensive changes in many key interfaces between the driver and the car including the center console, instrument clusters and safety elements. These areas are driving the need for accelerated graphics in the automotive environment by making these systems more user friendly, configurable and customisable.

On Wednesday 16th June, ARM will be holding a Mali Automotive Day in Detroit, at which we will be showcasing how the ARM Mali graphics processor technology can enable such innovation in the Automotive Industry. Together with ARM and its graphics Partners there will be presentations and demonstrations based on middleware technologies using Mali, to bring these visual experiences to life.

Partners presenting and showing at the event are: Altia, Digital Aria, Kishonti, Mentor Graphics, ...

Are you curious about Android on ARM? Are you interested in learning about the broad applications that Android is deployed (it’s not just mobile)? Then I invite you to join a webinar tomorrow (Tuesday May 25 11 am PDT) on Android and ARM by my colleagues Rod Crawford, principal software engineer and Jim Wallace, director of Home segment marketing. They are both well versed in the current Android trends. I invite you to come ask them a tough question (just don’t tell them I sent you:)


The momentum behind Android across a multitude of connected consumer devices continues to grow. The ARM ecosystem Partners have found that the connectivity, application and con...

Ever sat in a boring meeting or at an airport wondering if your crops on Farmville are withering and whether you need to go and harvest them (Farmville: an online farm simulation game available on Facebook) or want to get onto an online Texas Hold’em poker game with your friends. Such social casual games played online, via a web browser, have exploded in the last year. Zynga, the maker of Farmville and other Flash based games have more than 170 million active users today.

Let’s examine when and how these types of compulsive games will be available on your mobile phones.

The trend is shifting from console based games distribution to making games available through a web browser and played inside the browser. This is becoming very successful for a number of reasons: games are easy to launch and don’t need specialised software, other than an internet browser and some plug-ins; the ability to enable the “free to play” model with in-game premium items for purchase, making it easier for publishers to control games as they start to live on the cloud and enabling users quicker access to games without going through standard payment process. Anot...

On the 26th March ARM brought together a selection of Partners to present a daylong seminar focusing on the key elements affecting products being designed for the Home. This Home Seminar was attended by over 200 attendees from all the major ODM and SOC suppliers. The topics covered included the coming of Internet access and multimedia, the software re-use model, leveraging mobile solutions in non mobile applications, highlighting the Open Source environment and the diverse ARM ecosystem. The presentations were split between ARM and the following Partners covering the complete supply chain from Operator to SOC to Software partners:

Chunghwa Telecom a major Taiwanese ISP, talked about how they expect IPTV to change the whole industry. With Full HD, 3D UI and Fibre networking highlighted as the key tr...

People often ask me “so why does everyone get so excited about the touch screen phones?” What they really want to know is what is the secret sauce that’s led to the explosion of sleek keypad less objects which we love to stroke and poke? Well it’s actually pretty simple...It is in our nature as human beings to interact through visual and tactile means.

Here is a simple illustration... A while ago I took up diving and spent many happy hours drifting around in the red sea looking at all the pretty coloured life that abounds in the warm seas off the Sinai peninsula. After I gained a little more experience and confidence it was very interesting to watch newbie’s diving for the first time. One of the rules of diving, particularly around coral reefs is Don’t Touch! Primarily to protect the wild life, but also to protect you from yourself, as some of the prettier things are actually pretty nasty. Even though having been told this the enticement to touch and interact with all these new fabulous weird and wonderful creatures is extremely hard to suppress. They taunt you with their vivid colours, playful dances and energetic displays. It’s this urge to interact in this way that the device manufacturers have tapped into. Using the performance available to them through GPU and CPU technology device manufacturers are enticing us to inte...

I was talking to a customer a few months ago after he received the first validation board of their new Cortex-A9 and Mali-400 based silicon. He needed to develop and port as many applications as he could within a month to meet a demo deadline with their OEM. So he simply asked me “My boss wants me to write a leading edge 3D UI and port it to the board, do you happen to have a compelling example that you can provide me with that will allow me to meet this really short deadline?”. As it happened we actually did have one. We provided him with the Lotion UI demo we had built to demonstrate Mali GPUs capabilities and performance. He ported it within a couple of days and the demo to their OEM was a great success.

We reviewed this support case while going through the planning for the Mali Developer Centre launch. We thought that developers would find the Lotion UI example very helpful, either as a tutorial on how to write a fancy 3D UI leve...