Mali GPU Blog

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...

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...

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.

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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...

Last week the 37th SIGGRAPH conference was held in Los Angeles. It’s the annual gathering of computer graphics professionals from all the disciplines that the field touches. Given the current global economy, it was a smaller show than in the past. I sadly expected that, but was pleasantly surprised that it was a much better show than I had expected.

Colors and meshes – my take on the cerebral part of the conference
I had the luxury of just attending the conference this year (I’ve presented courses in 12 of the last 13 shows, as well as helping to organize several of...

8GE2FF22NUER 坐了12个小时的飞机，从剑桥赶到深圳的我站在集成电路应用展（China IC...

Wednesday was the last day of Design Automation Conference (DAC) and I spent my time visiting some of the ARM demos at the ARM Connected Community Partner booths learning about the various ways that our technology is being used with our Partners’ technologies and generally catching up with Partners. Highlights include the eReader, wafers and demos at the Common Platform booth and the presentation at the GlobalFoundries (GF) booth.

Common Platform: eReader, wafers and demos

I wandered over to the Common Platform (CP) booth to see multiple demos, some actual wafers and...

It's an exciting time to be developing ARM Mali GPUs and CPUs at the moment. In my previous blogs I have talked about the fact that GPU computing is a fast-expanding area that is coming to the devices that ARM Partners build and that OpenCL is a big part of that. It also finds applicability beyond GPUs, on CPUs, and one of the most interesting parts of my job is looking at the differences between domain-specific computing and computing that can be done on general-purpose CPUs.

Today, Khronos have announced the latest version of the OpenCL API that ARM and other companies have...

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...

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...

Smartphones continue to be one of the fastest growing and most attractive segments of the mobile device market. The desire for high performance handset giving access to an apparently infinite (estimation of 5 Billion apps in 2014) number of web services and applications drives the high end, while increasing demand from emerging markets for access to mobile internet at a lower price point expands the market in the high volume segments. For many people in the emerging countries, a smartphone will be the primary and only terminal to access the internet services.

Hardly a day goes by...

In my first blog, I discussed the technologies that enable GPU computing and the standards that arose to encourage that development. Now, what about the use-cases for GPU computing in mobile? It's often the first question I am asked when I visit our silicon partners and our OEMs and this is a subject that rouses a number of passions. Some people are suggesting that a killer use-case will be Augmented Reality...

Battery-powered GPU Computing
On the desktop, the killer applications have largely come from the High Performance Computing (HPC) community first: scientific...

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.
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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...

Are you the kind of person who would like to see proficiency levels assigned to GPS Maps? Did you ever wish for the “beginner” level where the GPS device would reassure you that you had taken the “Correct” left turn? Or would you like the challenge of the “advanced” level where you can race against the GPS on an alternative route?

So where is the future of Portable Navigation taking us? The advance level is still some way off! However, the “Roadmap in 3D” is coming, with models of buildings and points of interest, as you would see it through your windscreen....

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...

With so much excitement coming from Mobile World Congress 2010, it’s no surprise that ARM & its global Partners are being featured in so many press articles. Below are some of the coverage highlights from our Connected Community Partners’ announcements at the show: G&D, Qualcomm, Global Foundries, ST-Ericsson and Samsung.

G&D/QUALCOMM

G&D to enable PIN-protected transactions on NFC phones
By Sarah Clark, NearFieldCommunicationsWorld.com, February 15, 2010
Giesecke & Devrient (G&D) is demonstrating a prototype of a complete security...

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...

As a 10 year veteran of CES, it takes some big announcements to excite me, but CES 2010 did just that in the area of TVs. There are some exciting trends that are going to show up soon in our living rooms. In this three-part blog, I’ll discuss what I see as the four key trends from CES in TVs: 3D video HD TVs, ultra thin LED TVs, Internet connectivity and a convergence of devices with lower power consumption.

3D video HDTV:
3D TV was undoubtedly one of the hottest products at CES. Nearly all the top DTV OEMs, such as Samsung (using the high performance low power Cortex-A8...

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...