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Game Developer Conference 2012 - Mali Cometh...

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...

Mali GPUs Storming into 2012 - With Much More To Come

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 ...

ARM talks Graphics at Multicore Developers Conference

I will be attending the 7th Multicore Developers Conference in San Jose next week as I’m speaking on a panel there at the McEnery Convention Center, chaired by Jon Peddie, entitled “How Many Cores Does it Take to Reach the Singularity?”

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The ARM Mali-400 MP was the world’s first embedded multicore GPU, and ARM has been designing multicore CPUs for over a decade now, so it is natural that we be there to talk about our experiences and to discuss future technical directions. Currently, with the ...

嵌入式图形处理器中的内存管理

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CPUGPU共享,并充当...

TechCon 2011 - the ARM Mali GPU joined-up story is clear

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 ...

Creating the Augmented World with ARM Mali GPUs (Part 1 of 3)

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 ...

Changing Home Entertainment with Dazzling Graphics and Cool Google Apps

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...

ARM Powered Smartphone Sets New Graphics Benchmark

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...

ARM Discusses Future in Keynote: Heterogeneous Computing, CPUs and GPUs

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...

Moore’s Law Continues, but Needs Help from Heterogeneous Computing

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 ...

创维Android智能3D电视发布会见闻

3月30日上午, 创维在北京瑞创艺术中心举办了Android智能3D电视发布会, 本人有幸被邀请参加了此次活动. 在中国, 举办新品发布会应该说并不鲜见, 但此次发布的Android智能电视新品却有着些许不寻常的意义: 预计是国内第一款上市销售的Android电视; 全球首款采用ARM Cortex-A9Mali 400图形处理器的量产电视; 众多全新应用将彻底改变消费者对电视的传统理解.

会场的布置非常讲究, 蓝色的背景和灯光设计使现场充满了魔幻和科技感, Android机器人和动画标志随处可见, 由此可见创维对此次活动的高度重视和期待!

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发布会以杨东文总裁的发言开始, 他对智能电视的趋势和创维的发展战略做了相当深入的阐述; 接着几位营销负责人对创维Android智能电视做了详细的介绍. Amlogic CEO钟培峰先生的演讲虽然简短, 但措词精辟,...

ARM Partners everywhere at CCBN

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.

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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...

Multicore or Multi-pipe GPUs: Easy steps to becoming multi-frag-gasmic

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...

Mobile Game Graphics Going High-End

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...

Enjoying gaming…at last!

With the Game Developers Conference happening this week, I got to thinking about how gaming is becoming so much a part of all of our lives. I’m not sure if I dare say it amongst my gaming obsessed colleagues(!), but I’ve never really been one for games – whether it was board games or video games. My memory of gaming as a child was waiting and waiting til my two brothers would finally say “OK, it’s your go” and hand me the joystick, then within a matter of moments and probably flying a spaceship or suchlike in the wrong direction, I was dead, back to the end of the queue while they seemed to take forever to lose their lives! Not fun!!

But gaming is becoming so much more pervasive now, and it is effortlessly breaking through to so many demographic groups that wouldn’t have typically engaged in gaming. It only took my Mum a few moments to get the hang of Angry Birds on my ARM® Mali GPU-enabled tablet, and my stepdaughter is only interested in me for my smartphone so she can play Teeter! The simplest of game concepts seem to be so universally effective.

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Triangles Per Second: Performance Metric or Chocolate Teapot?

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...

The Incredible Becomes Reality at MWC 2011

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 ...

ARM Mali-T604 GPU Ready for Post-32-bit World and Real Computing

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 ...

Of Philosophy and When is a Pixel Not a Pixel?

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...

Visual Computing Will Be Powered By ARM Mali Graphics

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, ...

Embedded and Desktop - Similarities and Differences

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...

ARM Mali-T604: New GPU & Architecture For Highest Performance & Flexibility

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 ...

Immerse Yourself In TrueForce – Powered by Mali GPUs



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...

CPUs Have Been Doing GPU Computing Badly for Years

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 ...

We love academia: thanks for the citing – ARM Mali Graphics

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...

GPU Computing, the OpenCL debate and performance measurement

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 ...

Making the Mali GPU Device Driver open source

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...

SIGGRAPH 2010 - The People behind the Pixels

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 ...

GPU computing advance with new OpenCL API

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 ...

“The Mali Drive-Thru” – 16th June Automotive Day in Detroit

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, ...

Is Image Processing the Killer App driving GPUs?

On the desktop, the killer applications have largely come from the High Performance Computing (HPC) community first: scientific analysis, financial predictions, weather forecasting, and structural analysis etc. ...

Play with me… GPUs and CPUs optimized

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...

Develop intuitive 3D user interfaces using Mali UI Engine

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...
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