Mali GPU Blog

我们的一些合作伙伴在今年12月之前就已经把支持AndroidTM 4.0的产品介绍给市场了。下面介绍了几个基于Android 4.0的产品。
PR Newswire首先报道了瑞芯微基于Android 4.0的产品。随后，众多媒体相继报道了瑞芯微和原道，酷比魔方及纽曼等基于瑞芯微芯片的产品。例如，酷比魔方携手瑞芯微（Rockchip）推出基于安卓4.0的U9GT 2平板电脑产品。



蓝魔在官方网站上面也公布了基于Android4.0的W13HD。...

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,...

ARM年度技术研讨会（二）

大宽带时代即将到来，高清视频业务首当其冲? 这是今天在深圳举行的第三场ARM...

Just a day ago we’ve lifted the veil off the ARM® Mali™-T658, the second Mali GPU based on the Midgard architecture that we launched a year ago. It’s been brewing in our labs next to the Mali-T604 and already has key leading licensees, but until now hasn’t enjoyed the public presence of its sibling. Now they are both ready to power the leading end-user devices of 2012! Yes you hear right - expect to see them both in stores next year.

So how does the Mali-T658 complement the Mali-T604? By showing off some of the versatility of the Midgard architecture it brings in a...

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 Mali-T604 GPU launched in 2010, the Mali-T658 is the latest and most powerful Mali Midgard GPU to date. I should just explain that Midgard is the...

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 announcement together with CCI-400 Cache Coherent Interconnect (CCI). To...

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....

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...

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...

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Our latest world-class embedded graphics processor, the ARM® Mali™-T604 GPU, has excellent memory bandwidth, pixel fill rates to make the mind boggle, and gigaflops of programmable shading power to spare.

We need to keep this engine fuelled with data, and since most of its data comes from memory, we have spent a lot of time and effort designing its Memory Management Unit (MMU). I’d like to show you around its headline features, and explain why a properly designed MMU is so important.

Unified Memory Sharing
In a unified memory architecture, which...

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® Cortex™ -A9 and an almighty quad core Mali-400MP.


Here in ARM’s Media Processing Division...

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...

As promised, I gave a keynote speech at AMD’s Fusion Developer Summit last week, and it gained quite a lot of attention. There is a video of my speech here and the slides are attached at the bottom of this blog. Please take a look.

In my speech I set out the background - that Moore’s Law will continue, but the effects of it won’t give us as much of a frequency uplift and power reduction as we have been used to. We will have to use the additional transistors more cleverly, through the use of domain-specific processors and heterogeneous computing. We will make use of GPUs...

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...

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...

The ARM Mali-400 MP was the world’s first embedded multicore graphics processor (GPU) when it was launched, back in 2008, and Mali-T604 continues that trend. Since then, there have been a number of new GPUs claiming to be multicore and people have asked me lots of questions seeking to quantify what is a “core” versus a “pipeline” and about scalability, so I thought I’d share the answers with a wider audience. My colleague Jem Davies has noted before in his blog that the beginning of wisdom is to call things by their correct names. Graphics can sometimes be a very confusing area...

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. ...

Consumers are now looking for handsets that deliver everything that previously required separate devices, including high-end 3D gaming. Until now the meaning of ‘high-end mobile 3D graphics’ has mostly been limited to good looking static models with baked light maps. When can we expect to see some proper real-time pixel toasting?

Excitingly enough, a few pioneering game developers have lately created some mobile content that tries to do something beyond the basic fixed function shading which we all grew sick of in the 90’s. Rage by Id pushes the bar of OpenGL ES 1.1 using...

The practice of characterizing GPU performance in terms of triangle rate (triangles per second) has largely died out in the world of desktop graphics. Unfortunately, it continues to linger in the mobile graphics community. It is time to put a stop to it. There are three things wrong with it: first, it is ill-defined, making it impossible to compare numbers reported by different GPU vendors; second, it forces otherwise honest GPU vendors (not to mention unscrupulous ones) to mislead their customers, by measuring triangle rate under wildly unrealistic conditions; and third, if you do manage to...