ARM Community: Multimedia - ARM Community

The time of the year is upon us where an army from the ARM graphics ecosystem team descend upon yet another GDC (Game Developers Conference). This year we have significantly upped our presence at the event and the emphasis has been placed on getting the right resources to the developers.

We have a number of main conference sessions and for the first time we will also be hosting key gaming partners along with our developer education team to run talks on the ARM booth (More info on booth and partner activity at GDC 2013).

Last year at SIGGRAPH we were first to get OpenGL ES 3.0 development tools in the hands of developers in the form of the OpenGL ES 3.0 Emulator, OpenGL ES 3.0 SDK and the ...

At Mobile World Congress last week, the ARM® Mali™ team showed a selection of mobile features accelerated by GPU Compute functionality. There has been a lot of discussion round GPU Compute and last week ARM focused on showing the tangible benefits that GPU Compute can bring to real devices.



First part of turning GPU Compute into a reality is having real products. One of the first mobile devices able to showcase GPU Compute is the Google Nexus 10. This is the first device available that supports Google’s Renderscript GPU Compute. Renderscript is Google’s implementation of GPU Compute and is supported in Android. According to Google, Renderscript provides a platform-independent computation engine that operates at the native level. So it can be used to accelerate apps that require higher computational requirements. Google have a series of interesting blogs (...

In November 2011, the world did not know that it would be possible to pack a 1080p capable GPU, a 1.2 GHz CPU, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth into a USB stick sized device until FXI Technologies demonstrated the Cotton Candy™ any screen micro computer in fabulous New York. Something happened when we did that. First of all, it showcased the possibilities enabled by the ARM ecosystem. FXI was a small, but dedicated team in Norway and South Korea that had pulled out something new and sweet (some would say fluffy) from the magic hat of innovation. Second, it showed the world that high-end ARM SoCs are not confined to smart phones and tablets and mobile devices, but can drive any screen and any potential application. There is an ongoing string of innovation validating this point since, most recently with the announcement of the ARM-powered Samsung Chromebook.



The rec...

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 ...

Today at SIGGRAPH, Khronos announced the latest incarnation of graphics API targeted at embedded and mobile development – OpenGL ES 3.0. The new API brings many features that are present in the latest desktop and console APIs such as OpenGL 3.3 and 4 to the vast mobile gaming arena. Some of these exciting features that will be at your disposal include enhanced texturing support, high quality ETC2 / EAC texture compression, full support for integer and 32-bit floating point operations in shaders, occlusion queries, transform feedback, support for multiple render targets and much more. All of these enhancements to the rendering pipeline will accelerate and greatly enhance the visual experience of your content.

The Mali-T600 series of GPUs was designed from the ground up to fully support OpenGL ES 3.0[1]; we will begin to see consumer devices based on this family emerge later this year. ...

The quality of graphics on mobile is rapidly closing in on that seen on consoles. This is a surprising feat when you consider that there are two orders of magnitude difference in power consumption between them! This is due in part to mobile graphics not merely imitating console graphics, but rethinking old problems in new ways. All real time graphics are concerned with power efficiency, but it is in mobile, where power is at the greatest premium, that we are seeing the most power efficient ways to achieve the same high quality. Mobile graphics is a battleground with a lot of bleeding edges.

At Geomerics we have been keeping a close eye on these developments, and decided last year that the time was right to support mobile devices in our flagship graphics technology, Enlighten. Geomerics delivers cutting-edge graphics technology to customers in the games and entertainment industries. Enlighten is our suite of real time lighting technologies for top-end games d...

I blogged before that I was going to speak at the AMD Fusion Developer Summit. Yesterday in Bellevue I announced that ARM was joining the Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) Foundation as a founder member. There's also a video of me here. The HSA Foundation is an independent, non-profit consortium, and is open to any and all computing industry professionals with an interest in driving the next era in computing performance and energy efficiency. The purpose of the HSA Foundation is to drive the standardization of GPU programming and promote the published HSA specifications to help developers code easily and cost effectively.


ARM continues to drive industry with its vision of heterogeneous computing

ARM has worked closely with AMD since early 2011 helping define the HSA specifications and the formation of the Foundation. We brought our technical expertise in software, ...

Now the dust has settled after a hectic week in sunny San Francisco, I thought I should take some time out to update everyone on this hugely successful event for ARM and for ARM® Mali™ technology in particular. The Game Developers Conference, held at the start of March, has come a long way in 24 years, from the first gathering of 25 game developers in a living room, to GDC 2012 where 22,500 industry insiders descended upon the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco for a week long gathering to discuss ideas and to define the future of the gaming industry. This is now the single biggest gaming conference of its type in the world and features over 400 lectures, panels, tutorials and round-tables covering topics ranging from desktop console and mobile, as well as over 300 exhibitors.

This year there was a definite step up in mobile gaming interest, with not only the Smartphone and Tablet Summit, but a lot of tracks in the main conference covering the bringing of Triple-A content to mobile from the likes of Epic, Guild Software, etc... The...

Today, everybody agrees that SmartTVs will revolutionize the way we watch and interact with TV. However, some important challenges remain: like what are the best devices to interact with this new breed of TV, and how broad are the possibilities for apps and games? Are TVs becoming the windows to our digital world of connected devices?

We at SoftKinetic strongly believe that natural interaction with your television will profoundly change the way we interact with this smart device. Similarly to the mass adoption of touchscreens a few years ago for personal devices, gesture recognition is now becoming another critical building block. The performance of ARM Powered® boards, combining ARM Cortex™ processors and ARM Mali™ GPUs is amazing. It’s now possible to run full body tracking and analysis together with high-end apps and games.

As a...

The growth of internet TV and the increased demands on DTVs and STBs started a new era of the home application market. At the various home application exhibitions, the key OEMs are all displaying their latest SmartTVs and STBs, such as Samsung, LG, HiSense and Skyworth. Look at these products closely and you’ll find they are ARM powered! The growing momentum not only has placed the SmartTV at the center of home entertainment, but also changed the structure of the market players.

ARM open source support with Android™ and Linux
With close and continuous collaboration with Google on the ARM architecture and Android system, this combined hardware and software solution attracts more and more Apps developers and enables faster development cycles. ARM la...

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. ...

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 ...

Wow – what a day yesterday was, here at ARM Technology Conference (Techcon) 2010. All the effort and energy from a hugely focussed team has resulted in a fantastic reception for our new GPU, the Mali-T604. The buzz around the show and afterwards has been amazing – more than justifying the years of effort that the ARM Mali engineering teams have spent in creating this fantastic GPU for the new era of visual computing.

Building on the Successes of our Partner Mali platforms
Our fourth-generation GPU has been built on the success we have had with Mali-200 and Mali-400 MP. It was great that we had multiple Mali Partner platforms from Amlogic, Beijing Nufront, ...

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...

Fantastic! Here is a university group that has poked around, found one of ARM’s Mali graphics patents and taken the idea for a spin! Yes, I’ve been cited and it feels good.

Chih-Chieh Hsiao et al at the National Chiao-Tung University in Taiwan published the paper “A Hierarchical Primitive Lists Structure for Tile-based Rendering” at the 12th IEEE International Conference on Computational Science and Engineering in which they take a look at our next generation hierarchical tiling technology for keeping external memory bandwidth the lowest in the industry and thus save energy. Not only do they verify that this is pretty awesome stuff, they also explore some nifty ideas on how to improve it. Well done!

Designing graphics processors is a fantastic job. You get your hands dirty with the coolest technology on earth, and being smack in the middle of the action in the industry you get a pretty good view of what the world of technology will look like to the end-user years into the future. But there-in also lies the curse of this job. It takes a really long time from when we do our magic until it works its way through the value chain and the public get to...

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...

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...

来自...

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...