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Cool Compute – Is Now the Time to Harness Mobile GPU Compute?
Modern mobile GPU architectures, such as ARM®’s, endorse parallelism as the route to deliver the performance and power efficiency essential to push the growing number of pixels required to put compelling applications on our screens. But can all this power efficient GPU performance be harnessed by developers of non-graphics applications?

Today’s graphic cores can already deliver in excess of 60 GFLOPS of compute and it is claimed that their increasing GFLOPS/watt will exceed Moore's law. With all this theoretical performance on offer it is only natural to want to tap into it to develop the next cool application, but is it easier said than done?

Performance from Parallelism is Notoriously Difficult

Extracting performance from parallel architectures is notoriously difficult in all but the most obvious of cases – a fast and fancy Mandelbrot has never been much of a proof statement for me! And using existing APIs like OpenGL® to implement compute algorithms can often be, to put it kindly, not intuitive for the non-graphics programmer. However, the results can be compelling when the algorithms and APIs fit. We only have to look at the desktop GPGPU landscape to see wh...

Last week’s GDC 2013 was the fullest and busiest I have seen it in the many years ARM has been at the show. The sessions and expo were buzzing, and the panel we took part in - The Future of Mobile Gaming - was completely full. The panel session brought together a selection of key gaming industry influencers to talk about their opinions on the future of mobile gaming. With over 250 attendees this full capacity session brought together Baudouin Corman (Gameloft), David Helgason (Unity), Dr Chris Doran (Geomerics), Niccolo De Masi (Glu), Jasper Smith (PlayJam), Michael Ludden (Samsung Developers) and Nizar Romdhane (ARM).


A panel of this size and calibre brought to the GDC audience offered the chance for the game developer community to quiz these influencers on what’s next in gaming.

The panel got off to a fine start with a debate on the importance of AAA gaming in the mobile space. This brought out a range of opinions from AAA being the main path for mobile and the mobile exper...

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 ...

Last year I had an opportunity to cover the award-winning products based on ARM MaliTM-T604 including Google’s Chromebook and Nexus 10. Since then, those devices have reached millions of consumers and equipped them with cutting edge GPU Compute and Graphics capabilities. Two weeks ago ARM submitted OpenGL® ES 3.0 conformance test results with Khronos[1] for ARM Mali-T604. This brings the next generation graphics standard into the hands of developers who can benefit from mature silic...

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...

I’ve just about had a chance to recover from ARM’s recent triumphs, including at SIGGRAPH 2012: we were the first GPU IP vendor to gain OpenCL Full Profile conformance, we launched Mali-T624/Mali-T628/Mali-T678, we had ASTC adopted as a Khronos-approved extension, we helped launch OpenGL ES 3.0 and we showed off details of Trans...

The unprecedented pace of change in the Digital TV (DTV) space is set to continue with resolutions increasing as viewing becomes more realistic, this in conjunction with the change in the viewing habits away from set viewing times to viewing whenever and wherever you are, are changing the face of DTVs going forward. This blog looks at some of the key trends in the DTV space over the next few years that will transform the way we use and interact with the largest screen in our homes.

Resolutions: will continue to increase with High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) and 4k2k adoption - 1080p broadcast based on HEVC is bringing higher quality video to 4k2k screens - 4k2k is expected to be the main creator of demand for next generation DTV. The resolutions cannot be fully experienced without matching content resolutions, enabling the viewer to fully benefit from the increased screen resolution. 4k2k is expected to show similar resolutions to those obtained with 35mm films - movie studios are already moving towards being able to provide 4k2k content. The first 4k2k content is expected to be delivered via Blu ray, game consoles and personal video camcorder/DSLR. The broadcast version...

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...

The smart TV market has gone from concept to mass production over the last two years and 2012 saw an explosion of smart TVs being launched at CES which were summarised in Nizar Romdhane’s blog. The key products on show clearly demonstrated the pace of innovation in the DTV space, and one of the main features making these smart TVs popular is the improved user experience which has been enabled through enhanced user interfaces. Consumers are now able to intuitively interact with their DTV as they do with any other consumer product today, such as smartphones and tablets. The ability to play games without a console whilst accessing a wider range of content in a seamless way are all made possible due to the high-performance graphics that are now an integral part of the smart TV solution.

The applications processors now at the heart of most smart TVs are more often than not using the ...

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 ...

我们最近推出的世界级嵌入式图形处理器 ARM®Mali™-T604 GPU ,该处理器拥有出色的内存带宽、令人惊叹的像素填充率以及Gigaflops级的可编程着色处理能力。

我们需要让该图形处理器发挥强大的数据处理性能，鉴于它的大部分数据都来自内存，我们花了很多时间和精力来设计它的内存管理单元(MMU)。我将为您介绍它的主要功能，并说明为什么合理设计的MMU是如此重要。

统一内存共享
在大多数嵌入式图形系统所使用的统一内存架构中，内存由CPU和GPU共享，并充当�...

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 ...

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

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...