ARM Community: Multimedia - ARM Community

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

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

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

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

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

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�...

As you are probably aware, there has been a lot of excitement about the Android 4.0 “Ice Cream Sandwich” release that was finally made on the 14th November. As someone at ARM mentioned, it’s almost like Christmas, considering it has been nearly a year since it officially happened last time. Here at ARM’s Media Processing Division we are particularly thrilled because with every new Android revision we are seeing more of the visual computing use cases for Mali Graphics Hardware.

Mali has a growing ecosystem on Android and has been an integral part of its sweets, chocolates, pastries and biscuits since the early days of Donut. ...

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

The Midgard architecture
Following on from the ...

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

Crash course in Android RenderScript

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

The growth of internet TV and the increased demands on DTVs and STBs started a new era of the home application market. At the various home application exhibitions, the key OEMs are all displaying their latest SmartTVs and STBs, such as Samsung, LG, HiSense and Skyworth. Look at these products closely and you’ll find they are ARM powered! The growing momentum not only has placed the SmartTV at the center of home entertainment, but also changed the structure of the market players.

ARM open source support with Android™ and Linux
With close and continuous collaboration with Google on the ARM architecture and Android system, this combined hardware and software solution attracts more and more Apps developers and enables faster development cycles. ARM la...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 ...

So how did we do it? How did we create the coolest new GPU and architecture? Well, a few people have asked me this recently, so I thought I’d pull together all my stories, videos and blogs into one place (or at least the ones I can mention publicly).

Recently we had The Travelling Salesman stop by on his epic journey around the Nordic start-up scene and I gave him a short interview on our story from founding a tech company right up to being acquired by ARM. You can find the video from his visit below and his blog entry. And no I don’t usually wear sunglasses around the office...

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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...

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...

It’s an exciting time to be involved with graphics processing as the industry undergoes yet more rapid change with the ever increasing performance demands to meet the expectations of the “eye-candy” focussed consumer and extending capabilities of the hardware and the software to meet those raised expectations. The recent introduction of OpenCL 1.1 by Khronos has opened the realm of visual computing onto an ever wider portfolio of devices and we at ARM are certainly part of the forefront of that. Follow some of the ARM team’s recent Open CL debate in Tom Olsson’s blog Why OpenCL Will Be in Your Smartphone in 2014 and Jem Davies’ response GPU Computing, the OpenCL debates and performance measurement.

The ARM Technology Conference (Techcon) on November 9-11 in the Santa Clara Convention Center down in Silicon Valley is the place where the ...

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, ...

Everyone knows that GPUs are wonderful things that enable us to create stunning graphical effects through APIs such as OpenGL ES, but what else can we do with them? My good friend Borgar Ljosland suggested that Augmented Reality could be one of the next Big Things in his blog and while it's fun to argue with Vikings, he could well be right. Let's look into this a bit closer...

It is said that the beginning of wisdom is to call things by their correct names. If so, in the computing industry we are often not very wise… GPGPU (General Purpose Computing on Graphics Processing Units) has always seemed to me to be misnamed, since the computing that works best on GPUs is not really ver...