ARM Community: Multimedia - ARM Community

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).


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...

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...

Last week I was in Korea and Taiwan as part of the ARM Technical Symposia series of events happening in November and December. With the momentum behind Mali GPUs I was asked to come and talk about the innovations that we have seen recently, the challenges that we see coming up and how we propose to help to address them. One of these key opportunities is round the potential being enabled by graphics processing. Mali GPUs can now be found in over 200 end devices and many of these are coming out from the vibrant Android smartphone and tablet markets.

Graphics are becoming more central to consumer devices and we have seen a step change in the graphics performance available in smartphones, tablets and DTVs in the ...

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...

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...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

The ARM® Mali™ Ecosystem today has a broad community of developers and Partners who have created visually-compelling applications for Android™-based platforms using Mali GPUs. The Samsung Galaxy S2, the best Android smartphone in the market today, is showing how our Partners can develop high-end games and stunning user interfaces, creating an unparalleled user experience.

ARM has developed a strategy to provide the best AR solutions by working across the Augmented Reality (AR) value chain with key Partners.

Augmented Reality is one area that greatly benefits from platforms which provide high-performance CPU plus GPU solutions within a low-power profile, as AR applications require responsive image tracking, 3D graphics and a sustained battery life to make the technology viable.

The “Augmented City”, jointly developed by ARM and ...

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

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

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

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

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...

On the heels of CES 2011, where ARM products were everywhere from handsets, smartphones, tablets, DTVs and STBs, as well as Microsoft’s announcement to support Windows on ARM , comes the latest announcement from Sony Computer Entertainment on its next generation portable entertainment system, codename NGP.

It uses a very high performance, energy efficient quad core ARM ...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

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