ARM Community: Multimedia - ARM Community

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...

Today, everybody agrees that SmartTVs will revolutionize the way we watch and interact with TV. However, some important challenges remain: like what are the best devices to interact with this new breed of TV, and how broad are the possibilities for apps and games? Are TVs becoming the windows to our digital world of connected devices?

We at SoftKinetic strongly believe that natural interaction with your television will profoundly change the way we interact with this smart device. Similarly to the mass adoption of touchscreens a few years ago for personal devices, gesture recognition is now becoming another critical building block. The performance of ARM Powered® boards, combining ARM Cortex™ processors and ARM Mali™ GPUs is amazing. It’s now possible to run full body tracking and analysis together with high-end apps and games.

As a...

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?”



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 ...

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&...

What’s Up? I was recently selected to be the conference chair of the 41st annual SIGGRAPH conference. For those who are unfamiliar, SIGGRAPH is the Association of Computing Machinery’s (ACM) special interest group on computer graphics and interactive techniques. This huge conference regularly draws tens of thousands of attendees for its technical papers program, educational courses, lively panel discussions, art and technology showcases, electronic theater, and exhibition floor. If your senses are in need of an overload, this is the place to go!

Having attended the conference annually for more than half of my life, and actively presented at it over the last decade, being selected to chair the conference is a great personal honor, huge responsibility, and an immense opportunity.

Background. While a widely-held view of SIGGRAPH is that it’s only about creating sexy pixels, it’s also totally about interactive techniques. A large part of my career has been involved in getting damp life forms interacting with dry silicon: from my early work on flight...

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...

As graphics processor hardware now supports a number of different floating point data formats, it is important to understand how to select an appropriate format for your calculations, and why the choice is important. Even the simplest of operations benefit greatly from a little thought. Here is an instructive example that we recently came across.

Animating Shaders

If you are creating an animated shader in OpenGL ES, you will need to tell it the time. The obvious way to do this is to create a uniform variable called, let’s say, animation_time, and use it to modify some aspect of the object we are drawing, such as its color, position, or texture. Let us look at some complications that can occur.

Here is a very simple animated pixel shader that uses the time to pulse a red light repeatedly:

uniform mediump float animation_time; gl_FragColor = vec3(fract(animation_time), 0.0, 0.0);

The fract function returns the fractional part of the animation_time value, which gives us a sawtooth-like ramp over time. This is placed in the red component of the fragment color, so that the object appears to be repeatedly pulsing red.

We pass ...

Many times on my travels through the world of embedded GPUs I have come across someone asking “How easy is it to port my game to Mali™?” Well.....actually it’s not difficult at all, and this is reflected in the ARM® Mali™ Ecosystem. Let’s start by looking at the Ecosystem and its growth. Having now reached a massive half a million activations a day, Android is where it’s at! Especially now the Samsung Galaxy S2 has hit the market. The S2 is a dual core ARM® ...

你能回想起那一段在你拥有全彩色触摸屏幕智能手机，能让你通过点击和滑动丰富图形界面，轻松浏览您的电子邮件、日历和喜爱的游戏之前的时光么？高科技快速发展和其设备在如今都已经非常人性化和直观，消费者越来越习惯快速地掌握很多信息和娱乐资讯——以至于我们对这些设备都觉得理所当然。智能手机、平板电脑及一系列其他消费电子设备的性能日新月异，有时候我们需要花一点时间来感激这些科技带给我们的好处。

今天的消费者需要从一个设备到下一个设备无缝互联的用户体验。我们再也不能在通讯、社交、娱乐和全球导航的生活中没有我们的智能手机、平板电脑、数字电视和车载设备。根据一项调查发现，有84%的平板用户主要是玩游戏，但预估会有更多的时间花费在电子邮件或社交网站上。从最小屏幕的平价智能手机，到平板电脑，再到占据�...

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 ...

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-A9 和Mali 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!



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,�...

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...

Things have now wound down at the Moscone Center after a week of the Game Developers Conference (GDC). We’ve been catching up on what’s new, what’s cool and who’s who in the world of gaming, and after a hectic five days we’ve packed our bags and headed home.

It was a busy week, but what were the highlights? Well, for us at ARM, the rise of stereoscopic gaming was a hot topic and with our own Stereoscopic Space Racer game ‘TrueForce’ on show, we were really encouraged to see that.

The developments around gaming engines also caught our eye. Scaleform were showing their custom engine for rendering flash effectively on the GPU – it really works, it’s fast, and it makes the creation of UIs for games, in addition to UIs for applets, really easy.

The guys from Unity were also here in force, with their game engine now enabling developers to easi...

In the first blog of this series, I claimed that as a GPU performance metric, triangles per second (aka TPS or triangle rate) is a chocolate teapot – i.e. utterly and completely useless – and talked about the difficulty of getting a consistent definition of the metric. (Without such a definition, you can’t compare triangle rate numbers from different vendors.) I also gave some technical background on how GPUs draw triangles. In this installment, I’ll talk about how GPU vendors exploit the definition problem to claim enormous triangle rates, while actually telling you nothing about the performance of the GPU. Finally, I’ll explain why, even if you were able to measure an honest triangle rate, you wouldn’t want to.

How to draw a gazillion triangles per second
OK, so you’re a struggling GPU vendor who wants to claim “N gazillion triangles per second”. It doesn’t m...

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 ...

When I look back at CES 2011 ARM-based tablets generated a lot of excitement and press. While this year is a breakthrough year for tablets, I think it is also a breakthrough year for smart connected TVs. Is the timing here unrelated? I really don’t think so. The real story behind the story is that ARM technology is enabling your connected life – not only with smartphones and tablets but also by bringing smart technology into connected DTVs.

Smart technology from ARM moving from mobile to the home
Smart technology from ARM is powering some of the most important software innovations being adapted into connected TV. Operating systems like Google Android are optimized for the ARM architecture and support native development on ARM. Key connected software components like ...

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...

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 ...

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...

The number of Android based devices continues to explode in the smartphone market. As more Android smartphones are introduced into the market the ability to differentiate continues to be a challenge for many mobile device manufactures. This blog articulates how using an OpenMAX compliant Media framework as the foundation for building versatile multimedia applications can enable device manufacturers to differentiate their smart mobile devices.

Mobile multimedia applications and services have become a key area where device manufacturers can innovate and differentiate. Mobile consumers are demanding more video and audio applications and capabilities. In parallel, operators are seeking to increase revenue in new 3G and 4G networks by introducing various video and audio based services. The challenge for device manufacturers is to effectively service the mobile consumer while controlling their costs and delivering innov...

What is the killer app for OpenCL? It's a question we get asked all the time. Recently, I figured out the answer. The killer app for OpenCL, and for GPU computing in general, is… are you ready? are you sitting down? It’s graphics.

Open C-What?

Let’s back up a bit. OpenCL, if you hadn’t heard, is the latest API for general-purpose computing on GPUs. That is, it lets you use the graphics chip in your laptop / tablet / cell phone to run all kinds of computations that used to run a CPU – and in many cases, to run them a hundred times faster. OpenCL was created by the Khronos Group from a draft specification contributed by Apple. It ships standard with the latest version of Mac OS X, and implementations are available for Windows and Linux as well. (If it’s new to you, check out our previous posts on the topic.) It’s very cool technology. The question is, why do I, my kids, my mom, and (by the way) about a billion other consumers want this technology? Why is it going to be a mus...

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...

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, ...

Are you curious about Android on ARM? Are you interested in learning about the broad applications that Android is deployed (it’s not just mobile)? Then I invite you to join a webinar tomorrow (Tuesday May 25 11 am PDT) on Android and ARM by my colleagues Rod Crawford, principal software engineer and Jim Wallace, director of Home segment marketing. They are both well versed in the current Android trends. I invite you to come ask them a tough question (just don’t tell them I sent you:)


The momentum behind Android across a multitude of connected consumer devices continues to grow. The ARM ecosystem Partners have found that the connectivity, application and con...

Ever sat in a boring meeting or at an airport wondering if your crops on Farmville are withering and whether you need to go and harvest them (Farmville: an online farm simulation game available on Facebook) or want to get onto an online Texas Hold’em poker game with your friends. Such social casual games played online, via a web browser, have exploded in the last year. Zynga, the maker of Farmville and other Flash based games have more than 170 million active users today.

Let’s examine when and how these types of compulsive games will be available on your mobile phones.

The trend is shifting from console based games distribution to making games available through a web browser and played inside the browser. This is becoming very successful for a number of reasons: games are easy to launch and don’t need specialised software, other than an internet browser and some plug-ins; the ability to enable the “free to play” model with in-game premium items for purchase, making it easier for publishers to control games as they start to live on the cloud and enabling users quicker access to games without going through standard payment process. Anot...

On the 26th March ARM brought together a selection of Partners to present a daylong seminar focusing on the key elements affecting products being designed for the Home. This Home Seminar was attended by over 200 attendees from all the major ODM and SOC suppliers. The topics covered included the coming of Internet access and multimedia, the software re-use model, leveraging mobile solutions in non mobile applications, highlighting the Open Source environment and the diverse ARM ecosystem. The presentations were split between ARM and the following Partners covering the complete supply chain from Operator to SOC to Software partners:

Chunghwa Telecom a major Taiwanese ISP, talked about how they expect IPTV to change the whole industry. With Full HD, 3D UI and Fibre networking highlighted as the key tr...

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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...