ARM Community: Multimedia - ARM Community

It’s certainly been an action packed first quarter for ARM and our ARM® Mali™ Ecosystem Partners, and we hope you’ve had a chance to catch up with us at one or more of the recent string of events. If not, there are many more opportunities coming up! Here is a wrap up of the event highlights from our perspective.

Consumer Electronic Show (CES), Las Vegas
We kicked off with the annual wake up from the Christmas holidays at CES in Las Vegas, where ARM Powered® products filled the show floor and members of the ARM team clocked up many miles of walking from hall to hall and from meeting to meeting – a tiring but hugely productive few days. Check out for yourself the wide range of products that were on show by viewing our CES Playlist on the ARMFlix YouTube channel. There is also a range of CES blogs, all wrapped up in Andy Frame’s day 4 ...

If you attended CES this year you must have noticed that it was all about Smart TV and even if you didn’t attend you must have heard or read about it everywhere. Yes, the Smart TV has finally arrived.

Quoting the late Steve Jobs in his memorable speech at Stanford University “you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards”, at CES this year it was clear to me how the dots connect to the Smart TV. It all started when TVs went digital. Then the race to HD and 3D pushed the resolutions and highlighted the need to increase the computing capabilities. Bringing Internet connectivity at last year’s CES was a major step but it wasn’t until full application processors made their way into the TV that it has finally become “smart”. This year at CES the Smart TV was everywhere.

So what is making the new application processors so special that the Smart TVs they enable took over the show? Processors made their way into TVs a while back but the main difference with the application processors inside ARM Powered® Smart TVs is that they have the powerful ARM ...

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. ...

If you follow Jem Davies’s blog, then you may have noticed that at ARM TechCon™, he made a cryptic comment about an “exciting new Mali graphics product launch” news coming. Wait no longer! ARM just launched the new multicore Mali-T658 GPU here in Tokyo, Japan and we’ll be telling you all about it during a series of Technical Symposia around Asia in the coming weeks.

The Midgard architecture
Following on from the ...

Everyone is excited by Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) and no wonder! Google’s "most ambitious release to date" rolls out many new features that look very promising indeed: zero-click NFC sharing (Android Beam), a unified OS for smartphones and tablets, a new UI (with resizable widgets), single motion panoramic camera, face unlock, live effects and so on. And this time it will all be Open Source. All great, but to be honest, what I am really excited about is a less advertised technology called RenderScript, which in ICS takes another significant stride towards maturity. And why does this excite me? Because RenderScript is the API that will soon enough enable GPU Computing) in Android.

Crash course in Android RenderScript

So, what is RenderScript? It is a new programming framework and API for Android, which Google originally introduced in Honeycomb. In ...

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...

Our latest world-class embedded graphics processor, the ARM® Mali™-T604 GPU, has excellent memory bandwidth, pixel fill rates to make the mind boggle, and gigaflops of programmable shading power to spare.

We need to keep this engine fuelled with data, and since most of its data comes from memory, we have spent a lot of time and effort designing its Memory Management Unit (MMU). I’d like to show you around its headline features, and explain why a properly designed MMU is so important.

Unified Memory Sharing
In a unified memory architecture, which most embedded graphics systems use, memory is shared between the CPU and GPU and acts as a high bandwidth communication channel for the scene data.

The application running on the CPU, with the co-operation of the driver stack, will have allocated memory and set up all the data required to render a scene. A good application will prepare data in a format that the hardware can read directly, so that the driver stack has low overhead. (The chance of this happening are greatly increased if the GPU can read multiple different types of data, but that’s a topic for another time....

Taking an in-depth look at all methods used throughout the industry to compare GPU performance in the handset space as well as their accuracy (or lack thereof) is not an easy task. Uniquely this year, the Samsung Galaxy S II with Mali-400 MP according to Engadget and Techradar has unanimously set the highest benchmark score among the currently available smartphones.

Evaluating graphic performance is often a subject of controversy and involves wading in the muddy waters of 3D benchmarking. These days, consumers will often use hardware capabilities to quantify purchasing decisions and tech-savvy buyers wi...

Moore’s law is not broken: shock, horror, screaming headline! It will last for a while longer yet - new generations of silicon process will continue to give us more transistors on chips, but that won’t, on its own, give us the increases in performance and decreases in power consumption we have become used to. However, we can utilise those extra transistors, to build multicore processors and more of them, and through heterogeneous computing and appropriate use of domain-specific processors. This will give us the increased performance and improved energy-efficiency we need. These are critical areas for us to concentrate on for the future if we are to continue to lead in energy-efficiency.

At ARM, we focus on energy-efficiency: not just making IP blocks that make the best possible use of energy themselves but also that lead to partner SoCs using less energy overall (e.g. by reducing external memory bandwidth). One of today’s exciting technical challenges is heterogeneous computing, and we invest a lot of time working in this area to enable more energy-efficient consumer electronics devices. Consequently, when AMD kindly invited me to give a keynote speech at their ...

The ARM Mali-400 MP was the world’s first embedded multicore graphics processor (GPU) when it was launched, back in 2008, and Mali-T604 continues that trend. Since then, there have been a number of new GPUs claiming to be multicore and people have asked me lots of questions seeking to quantify what is a “core” versus a “pipeline” and about scalability, so I thought I’d share the answers with a wider audience. My colleague Jem Davies has noted before in his blog that the beginning of wisdom is to call things by their correct names. Graphics can sometimes be a very confusin...

Consumers are now looking for handsets that deliver everything that previously required separate devices, including high-end 3D gaming. Until now the meaning of ‘high-end mobile 3D graphics’ has mostly been limited to good looking static models with baked light maps. When can we expect to see some proper real-time pixel toasting?

Excitingly enough, a few pioneering game developers have lately created some mobile content that tries to do something beyond the basic fixed function shading which we all grew sick of in the 90’s. Rage by Id pushes the bar of OpenGL ES 1.1 using Carmack’s black magic texture streaming tricks. Infinity Blade, based on the Unreal Engine, features some basic per pixel bump shading the low resolution versions for iPhone. In the higher resolutions however, the game seemingly is more or less surviving on the great artist work alone.

ARM’s GPU strategy has always focused on high performance in the demanding pixel shading cases, required to truly enable desktop- and console-leve...

Stunning graphics powered by Mali GPUs coming to a mobile device near you!

We have been busy preparing for MWC this year – and hope to impress and inspire you with a shiny new Augmented Reality (AR) demo put together by our Cambridge demo team. Here is a taster of what you can come and see for yourself at MWC! We’ll also be catching up with our business Partners and talking about the upcoming solutions that they are building ARM® Mali™ graphics into. In the last three months alone, four more licensees in the mobile space have chosen Mali GPUs – continuing our momentum in bringing new levels of graphical capabilities to mobile handsets. This includes Spreadtrum Communications, Inc. choosing the ...

It’s been a busy few months here at ARM in the run up to the launch of the ARM® Mali™-T604 Graphics Processor (GPU) at ARM Techcon. In the post-launch lull (i.e. returning to a slightly more normal level of madness) I’ve been watching the blog-o-sphere for reaction to our new technology launch. While watching the various comments, I’ve noticed that people are having a few issues with some of the performance metrics being pushed at them. Take fill rate, for example. ARM believes in quoting our fill rate performance as bilinearly-filtered, fully textured pixels, written out to the frame buffer pixels (“BFT pixels“) as we believe that’s the most honest, the easiest to compare, and the easiest to understand metric. Pretty straightforward you woul...

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, ...

Today we announced the ARM® Mali™-T604 GPU, the first implementation of ARM’s new Midgard architecture. The increase in screen resolutions and the demand for better-looking and more intuitive displays needs a huge increase in graphics capability. These demands for the highest levels of performance and flexibility, support for new APIs such as Khronos™ OpenCL™ and Microsoft® DirectX®, all in an energy-efficient way called for a new embedded GPU architecture...

Wait. That was a bit dull. It didn’t have the why, the how, or my excitement! Let me try again:

What
At last; it’s here. We’ve been hinting, and I’ve been bursting to tell ...

How can someone from the company with the most CPUs in use in the world say something like this? Well it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve been told I was wrong and I confidently predict it won't be the last.

GPU Computing
After a recent lecture, I started thinking again about some of the basic assumptions and language in use when this subject gets discussed: "What CPU tasks are suitable to run on a GPU?", for example. On reflection, I feel the language is wrong and I take issue with the question. For example, the CPU has been doing graphics for years and rather badly, at that - just look at the quality and richness of modern consumer electronics devices which use GPUs to see the difference. I believe we should be talking about moving computation tasks to their rightful homes - where they can be done most efficiently in terms of performance and in terms of energy consumption. Does anyone else think I'm on the right lines here? It's not a war between CPU designers and GPU (or video engine) designers about who is right. Surely it's about appropriate engineering design?

Thought-provoking Lecture at University (You Don't Understand Something Until You Teach ...

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...

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...

It's an exciting time to be developing ARM Mali GPUs and CPUs at the moment. In my previous blogs I have talked about the fact that GPU computing is a fast-expanding area that is coming to the devices that ARM Partners build and that OpenCL is a big part of that. It also finds applicability beyond GPUs, on CPUs, and one of the most interesting parts of my job is looking at the differences between domain-specific computing and computing that can be done on general-purpose CPUs.

Today, Khronos have announced the latest version of the OpenCL API that ARM and other companies have been working on for a while. The new features that this brings to the API and other details are discussed ...

As this is my first time visiting Computex I was anxious to see how the emerging trends from CES earlier this year have been adapted and regionalized for the local market. At CES we saw a new era of connected devices, great 3D stereoscopic and UI experiences all implemented in energy efficient CE platforms. So what trends will we take from this year’s Computex into CES next year? Read more to get a quick preview…..

Connected TVs are still the trend to follow in the connected home; there are several that come to mind from Google’s latest SmartTV announcement at the GoogeIO event last week to Microsoft’s Mediaroom, Yahoo or Samsung’s Internet@TV.

Microsoft has been in the Smart TV space for a number of years and has strong partnerships with a number of operators, OEMs and content partners across the industry and around the world.

Yahoo!'s...

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...

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...

As a 10 year veteran of CES, it takes some big announcements to excite me, but CES 2010 did just that in the area of TVs. There are some exciting trends that are going to show up soon in our living rooms. In this three-part blog, I’ll discuss what I see as the four key trends from CES in TVs: 3D video HD TVs, ultra thin LED TVs, Internet connectivity and a convergence of devices with lower power consumption.

3D video HDTV:
3D TV was undoubtedly one of the hottest products at CES. Nearly all the top DTV OEMs, such as Samsung (using the high performance low power Cortex-A8 core), LG, Sony, Panasonic, Sharp, HiSense, and Haier displayed their 3D TVs, especially their “Blu-ray” big screen TVs, displaying high quality 3DTV content. In addition, some key silicon vendors including nVidia showed their technologies for 3D high profile video. (Imagine all the 3D eyewear trends for the home; the need for new social protocol;…do you bring your own glasses for movie viewing at friends?)

Issue for me: will there be enough content to support the change of DTVs, STBs, or both?

Panasonic 3D world
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