ARM Announces New GPU Design; Level Ups Graphics

British computer chip designer ARM has announced the latest member of its Midgard architecture-based GPU family, the ARM Mali-T658 Graphics Processing Unit. The earlier version of the series Mali-400 MP GPU which featured in the award-winning Samsung Galaxy 2 was crowned the fastest smartphone GPU in comparison to rivals of the likes of Apple and LG. ARM's previous design allowed up to four cores to be connected. The Mali-T658 doubles the maximum to eight, with each core offering double the arithmetic capability.

The Mali-T658 offers both performance and energy inefficiency making use of ARM's system-level approach to multi-core design. The Mali-T658 targets high performance devices, such as superphones, tablets and smart-TVs. Providing high performance through powering up of all eight cores, ARM has also made sure to conserve energy by powering down most cores during trivial tasks. The ARM Mali-T658 GPU supports a wide range of graphics and compute APIs, including Microsoft DirectX® 11, Khronos OpenGL® ES, OpenVG™, Khronos OpenCL™, Google ® Renderscript ™ and Microsoft DirectCompute®.

 

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ARM's CPU market has been ahead of its GPU demand. Through the introduction of Mali-T658 ARM hopes to cover that lag. It has been designed to work in sync with ARM Cortex™-A15 and Cortex-A7 processors. Cache coherency is also an enabled feature in the Mali-T658 processors. Cache coherency is an essential measure for high-computing devices as it maintains the consistency of data stored in local caches of a shared resource which ensures optimum performance and energy-efficiency of complex heterogeneous SoC designs.

ARM also hopes to make full use of GPU-Acceleration with its new architecture designs. The next generation GPU may start appearing in devices towards the end of 2013.

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