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ARM Community: Multimedia - ARM Community

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Low-Energy Application Parallelism

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...

ARM ecosystem expertise shared at GDC 2013

Much has been said already in these blogs about ARM’s presence at GDC, from coverage of the great range of ARM partner demos on show to an overview of the hugely popular panel discussion hosted by ARM, “The Future of Mobile Gaming”.

Yet one of the stones which we have so far yet to un-turn has concealed the wealth of information, expertise and advice which was shared with attendees of the ARM booth’s local lecture theatre. Three days of presentations from both ARM engineers and ARM partners covered subjects from game analysis and optimization to the world of augmented reality. They vary in their depth from detailed coverage of specific techniques to broad overviews of hot gaming topics and are all less than twenty minutes in length, making them perfect for a quick catch-up on the latest events in the gaming industry.

ARM partners who were demonstrating their latest products at the booth took to the stage during the week to give overviews to the audience of their current work and what they are aiming to bring to the gaming industry in the future. Examples from this series of excellen...

What is the Future of Mobile Gaming? GDC Panel Summary

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).

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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...

Mali Developer Tools, Augmented Reality, Lighting, SDKs & More at GDC

The annual Game Developers Conference (GDC), which took place last week in San Francisco, is always an exciting event for the ARM Mali team. This year the ARM booth was buzzing with activity – we had a multiplayer gaming challenge (winners received Nexus 10’s!), a wall of Mali demos, technical presentations on the booth from ARM engineers and our Partners, and demonstrations of our Partners’ latest products running on Mali-based devices.

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Multiplayer Gaming Sports Car Challenge & Mali Demo Wall


Here is a wrap-up of what I managed to capture:

ARM TOOLS

To get an update on tools and resources available to Mali developers, I spoke with Anand Patel, the product manager of Mali Tools at ARM. The videos below cover:

ARM Develop...

New Developer Resources for GDC 2013

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 ...

Mali GPUs at GDC 2013

The Game Developers Conference is now a week away and dawning bright and clear on ARM's horizon. The largest and most professional event in the games industry calendar, this conference gets bigger and better year on year and 2013 is set to be no different, especially for ARM and its partners. By providing a comprehensive forum for gaming developers to showcase the industry's most recent and relevant tools, platforms and services the event propels innovation within the industry and defines the future of gaming.

Where else would the ARM Multimedia Team rather be?

"The Future of Mobile Gaming", an ARM-sponsored panel discussion, will undoubtedly be one of the highlights of the show. Featuring Baudouin Corman (VP Publishing Americas, Gameloft), David Helgason (CEO, Unity), Dr Chris Doran (Founder & COO, Geomerics), Niccolo De Masi (CEO, Glu), Jasper Smith (CEO, PlayJam) and Nizar Romdhane (Director of Ecosystem, ARM), this hour-long, audience-participative debate will place technology in the context of design and business, covering critical questions such as how the rapid increase in popularity of mobile de...

OpenGL ES 3.0 on Mali GPUs - Business as usual

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...

The Mali Ecosystem makes GPU Computing a reality!

I have just attended the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, and for another year survived an intense week of tapas, paella and customer meetings overindulgence. I was overwhelmed by all the positive feedback received from ARM partners and booth visitors on the great progress and industry leadership position of ARM Mali™ GPU Computing technologies. This is not surprising, we worked very hard to get here, but what makes this special is seeing all the great work from our partners and collaborations starting to flourish.

Fast and continued progress
Little over a year ago I wrote with enthusiasm about how the Mali-T600 series of GPUs is uniquely placed to accelerate GPU Comput...

Mali GPUs at MWC: Market Leading Graphics and GPU Compute

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.

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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 (...

CES: Technologies becoming a reality

CES was a great show for ARM, there were plenty of ARM powered smartphones, families of Mali™ GPU enabled Android tablets, from entry level brands to the latest Google Nexus 10 with 2.5K displays, and larger than ever Mali GPU enabled 4K smartTVs.

We had a record number of meetings with Ecosystem partners, Operators, SIPs and OEMs. There was a great deal of interest around Renderscript and OpenCL, and in particular the fact that ARM was the only IP provider to offer a full profile 64- bit GPU compute platform today. OpenGL ES 3.0 features were also a major hit with our partners.

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Samsung’s latest ARM Cortex and Mali GPU based DTVs


Mali GPUs bring the graphics experience to over 50% of the Android based tablets and more than 70% of the smart DTVs. Samsung showcased their latest DTVs and the revolutionary evolution upgrade kits and LG introduced their latest Google TV. Additionally, there were a larg...

A Sweet New Market with ARM Graphics at the Core

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.

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The rec...

ARM POP IP for Mali GPUs making your mobile phone last even longer

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 ...

ARM Mali Graphics, GPU Computing and reflections from shows

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...

ARM Welcomes OpenGL ES 3.0 (Halti)

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. ...

Future of DTV - Fast, Everywhere, Dynamic

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London Olympics 2012

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 ARM Mali GPU - Making a Splash at this week's Develop Conference

This year’s Develop Conference, the leading conference in Europe for game developers, is set to be the best ever. Now in its 7th year, the event attracts over 1500 of the industry’s leading game developers, as well as influential speakers and industry veterans, such as Ian Livingstone, David Braben and David Perry.

ARM’s Media Processing Division is excited to be exhibiting at this year’s conference, held 10-12 July in Brighton, UK. ARM will be showcasing the full capabilities of our MaliTM GPUs through a wide range of devices and demonstrations. Plus ARM engineers and technical experts will be on hand to offer advice and guidance to developers, so stop by for a chat.

ARM’s Stacy Smith, a senior software engineer who is part of a two-person team ...

Lighting on mobile - something to keep your eye on

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...

ARM announces founding of Heterogeneous System Architecture Foundation

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.

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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, ...

Mali leads graphics in the DTV space

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 ...

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.

...

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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