Login

ARM The Architecture For The Digital World  

ARM Community: Multimedia - ARM Community

Jump to content

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 ...

Mali served with frozen dessert

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. ...

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 ...

GPU Computing in Android? With ARM Mali-T604 & RenderScript Compute You Can!

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 ...

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 ...

Porting Games to Multiple Devices Made Easy

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® ...

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...

什么样的产品为你带来互联生活?

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 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 ...

Which Devices Enable Your Connected Life?

Can you think back to a time before you owned a full color, touchscreen smartphone that allows you to navigate easily to your emails, calendar and favorite games by tapping and sliding on a graphically rich interface? Technology moves fast and with devices now being so user-friendly and intuitive, consumers are becoming rapidly accustomed to having so much information and entertainment at their fingertips – so much so that we take these devices very much for granted. The capabilities of smartphones, tablets and a range of other consumer devices have advanced so much, it is good to sometimes take a moment to really appreciate how much they now do for us.

Today’s connected consumer wants a seamless, connected user experience from one device to the next and we can no longer live without our smartphones, tablets, DTVs and automotive devices – for communication, social networking, entertainment and global navigation. ...

ARM Sponsors Inaugural Linley Tech Mobile Device Conference

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...

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.

...

NextGen portable gaming redefined by Sony PSP NGP with Cortex-A9

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 ...

Smart TVs make a Connected Life a reality at CES

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

VOME: OpenMAX Compliant Media Framework for Android

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...

Why OpenCL will be on Every Smartphone in 2014

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...

Meeting the Needs of Global Mobile Workforce with the Nirvana Phone

The telecom and IT industries have for decades made much of technology convergence. Convergence of wireless and terrestrial. Convergence of voice and data. And most recently, convergence of mobile and desktop computing.

Mobile-desktop convergence has led to new form factors, like netbooks and now the iPad, offering intriguing hybrids of mostly existing capabilities. So far, it has created new categories of devices, without eliminating laptops and handsets. True convergence would mean fewer gadgets in users’ lives, not simply introducing new ones.

The explosive growth of smartphones and accompanying applications, increasingly deployed on ARM Cortex™ processors, finally promises to deliver convergence. Today’s smartphones, especially handsets built on Android, offer new options for worker productivity beyond voice, texting, and email. But pocket-size smartphones still limit full productivity due to small screens & keyboards.

Earlier th...

ARM Webinar: Enabling multiple-segment Android based devices

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:)

Live Webinar Broadcast Date - Tuesday, 25 May, 2010 11:00 AM PDT/ 2:00 PM EDT/ 7:00 PM BST


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...

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. ...

GPGPU - What is it good for?

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...

ARM enabling the connected consumer at CCBN 2010

...

CCBN 2010:安谋推动互联消费者

来自...

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...
  • (16 Pages)
  • +
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • Last »
All company and product names appearing in the ARM Blogs are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of ARM Limited per ARM’s official trademark list. All other product or service names mentioned herein are the trademarks of their respective owners.
Maximise
Minimise
» 

My Blog Links

» 

ARM Onsite

» 

Search My Blog