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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...