Mali GPU Blog

Play with me... GPUs and CPUs optimized

[24-Feb-2010]

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 interact by creating shoals of brightly coloured icons which swim across the screen inviting us to reach out and touch them.

Develop intuitive 3D user interfaces using Mali UI Engine

[12-Feb-2010]

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 leveraging Mali GPUs features and benefits, or to serve as a starting point to developing a more advanced 3D UI. So we decided to productize it along with the engine that was used in developing it.

Finally GPUs make a difference!

[21-Jan-2010]

Seven years ago I was working in a small company where we based our entire existence (and our investors’ money) on one single fact; that 2004 would be the year when hardware accelerated graphics took off in mobile phones. Every major handset vendor would ship devices with performance & features going beyond current handheld consoles. Accelerated mobile gaming, ranging from high-end 3D action to 2D casual games, was going to be the main driving factor, and would soon be followed by animated greeting cards, 3D mascots and real-time advertisements.

Six years after that important breakthrough, which, by the way, didn't quite arrive as planned, I'm now rather happy that we adjusted our direction a couple of times during the early 00's. Not just because I still have a company to work for, although that is nice, but also because the market is now finally ready for the kind of GPU capabilities we were planning for back then.

Getting the best user experience using the Mali Developer Tools

[07-Dec-2009]

A while back I was riding my motorbike in the country roads surrounding Cambridge, when my gearbox shift became detached. Luckily I managed to stop the bike by engaging the clutch and coasting it until it stopped. I thought that the ride was over and that I would need to call the insurance company to take the bike back to the garage but I remembered that when I bought the bike the sales person convinced me to go for the grand touring version because it comes with a full set of tools underneath the seat that can help fix any problem I might face. So I said “ok this is it, it’s time to find out if that really works or if that was just marketing”. To my surprise the tools were really tailored to match all the bolts, nuts, etc. that were fitted to the bike and I managed to fit back the gearbox shift easily within 15 mins following the instructions in the quick fix manual that was also underneath the seat. A few months later I had to change the rear suspension which normally I would have left to the garage to do but I was tempted to find out if the tools provided with the bike could also handle such a job, and they really did. It took all my Saturday, which didn’t make my wife really happy, but what mattered is that it worked; the tools and the manual did what the marketing promised.

Shortly after this incident I moved to the Media Processing Division to manage the free Mali GPU tools for the graphics developer community. My first thoughts were to my recent experience with my motorbike. The tools must provide a great out of box user experience and assist the developers in all the steps to get their graphics applications done easily within the shortest period of time. Starting from manipulating the assets provided by the artists to analysing and tweaking the performance and going through the software development as well as the Shaders authoring for the configurable flavour of OpenGL ES, version 2.0. The Mali GPU Developer Tools are available from the Mali Developer Center which will provide you with the great user experience you’re expecting from the most widely licensed GPU architecture in the world.

The Mali Developer Tools are categorized in 3 categories: software development, shader authoring and performance analysis & optimization...

The Latest Mali Graphics Demos – Eye Candy or Reality?

[16-Oct-2009]

Well the short answer is both. ARM® Mali™ GPUs are now showing off their true horsepower in Partner silicon hardware at various events across the globe. These Mali GPU-enabled devices are making their way into smartphones, set-top boxes, digital TVs, portable navigation devices, smartbooks and much more.

What is great about the demos is that they show evidence of how the user experience is enhanced and how the latest User Interfaces (UIs) can now deliver an amazing sense of immersion in the 3D space.

Mali GPUs accelerate user interfaces, 2D and 3D maps, games and web browsers – but what’s different? The fact that Mali GPUs can give you 4x Anti Aliasing for free is one, and added to that, the Mali architecture keeps overall bandwidth and energy consumption low...

Boosting Future Multimedia Devices

[21-Oct-2009]

My wife thinks my job is to breed worms and develop environmental habitats. While this is obviously not true, there are some parallels to be drawn between her thinking and my real job of enabling a robust graphics ecosystem. For example my job does involve helping develop efficient interdependencies between partners (organisms) who share a common technology culture (habitat). The partners in this case include almost everybody in the software creation value chain of consumer electronics, namely the silicon vendors, OEMs and their 2^nd and 3^rd party developers. The technology that binds all of my ecosystem partners together is advances in graphic technology with adoption of graphics processing units (GPU), and history has taught us that the early marriage of software and hardware is essential for market success for upcoming technologies.

The software developer ecosystem is facing multiple challenges at this time, when time to market is crucial for everyone including OEMs and 2^nd party developers who produce increasingly complicated devices.

Mobile application stores, originally introduced by Qualcomm and perfected by Apple, have produced the right formula for a huge number of 3^rd party developers, including “indie” developers, to jump onto the application development band wagon.  A shift in mobile applications from pre-load to post-load has meant that deploying and developing for multiple OEM handsets can be a logistical nightmare.  Furthermore, in a feverishly competitive application store market, developers need all the support they can get to produce premium content...