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 ...

ARM’s GPU architects and engineers regularly push the envelope in mobile graphics technology, which is why the latest Mali GPU cores offer such a unique combination of best-in-class graphics performance, an aggressively forward-looking feature set, and unprecedented scalability. But the engineers also make more fundamental contributions to graphics technology. This week at SIGGRAPH Asia, we’re disclosing a new approach to texture compression. This technology enables deep reductions in GPU memory bandwidth and application memory footprint, which in turn allows improved performance and lower power. In this blog, I’ll talk about where the technology came from, why it’s important, and where we’re going with it.

Why I Love My Job
Early in my engineering career, my boss/mentor at the time told me something I've never forgotten: According to polls (he said), among engineers who say they love their jobs, the thing they like best about them is that "they get to work with smart people&...

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 ...

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....

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 ...

ARM’s Cortex™ family of processors and Mali™ GPU’s are the applications, media processing and graphics acceleration engines at the heart of today’s smartphones. Audio and video codecs have been implemented efficiently in software on several previous generations of ARM-based processors and more recently many of these codec implementations have been optimized to take advantage of the NEON™ coprocessor technology for higher performance and lower power. To support the growing requirement for graphical user interfaces (GUI) and 3D gaming on high resolution mobile devices ARM have added the Mali family of graphics processor units (GPU’s) to its product line up. The Mali GPUs accel...

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...

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 ...

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 ...

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 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...

Audio is increasingly becoming a mandatory feature in every range of consumer appliances seen of late. Audio centric features like voice instructions, compressed music playback provide for an enhanced user interaction. Such features are now expected in every application segment, even in the low cost applications based on microcontrollers without DSPs. The solution for low cost, efficient audio processing lies in the upcoming microcontrollers based on ARM Cortex-M4.

With the arrival of digital audio and the success of compressed music with innovative ways of enabling these functionalities, speech and audio processing has dramatically changed in the last decade. However, in the embedded world, most of such intensive audio processing is typically done on DSP kind of devices, as they can provide both the capability and the level of power required. Those days are now gone, with future microcontrollers being as capable of processing audio as their DSP counterparts.

“With the launch of ARM Cortex-M4 processor, intensive audio processing can be efficiently...

As this is my first time visiting Computex I was anxious to see how the emerging trends from CES earlier this year have been adapted and regionalized for the local market. At CES we saw a new era of connected devices, great 3D stereoscopic and UI experiences all implemented in energy efficient CE platforms. So what trends will we take from this year’s Computex into CES next year? Read more to get a quick preview…..

Connected TVs are still the trend to follow in the connected home; there are several that come to mind from Google’s latest SmartTV announcement at the GoogeIO event last week to Microsoft’s Mediaroom, Yahoo or Samsung’s Internet@TV.

Microsoft has been in the Smart TV space for a number of years and has strong partnerships with a number of operators, OEMs and content partners across the industry and around the world.

Yahoo!'s...

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...

3 月 26 日，ARM 将精英合作伙伴汇聚一堂，召开了为期一天的研讨会，着重讨论影响家用设计产品的关键要素。来自所有主要 ODM 和 SOC 供应商的 200 多名与会者参加了本次家用产品研讨会 (Home Seminar)。本次研讨会涉及的主题包括：互联网访问和多媒体时代的来临、软件 重用模型、在非移动应用中利用移动解决方案、强调开源环境和多种 ARM 生态系统。演示划分为 ARM 和以下合作伙伴两大部分，内容涵盖从运营商到 SOC 及...