UK-based chip heavyweight Arm has rolled out a host of new designs for mobile OEMs, including a new Mali GPU — now boasting 24 cores and a 25 percent increase in performance — along with a new line of cut-price GPUs for partners seeking to scale designs down to smaller silicon areas.
This is no niche news: Arm’s partners have shipped over one billion Mali GPUs annually over the past few years and high-performing GPUs are a must: Arm points to research from Newzoo, which says mobile accounted for more than 46 percent of the global games market in 2019, or $68 billion in revenues.)
New Arm GPU: “Cheap, Small Options too Please”
It is arguably unusual to see companies boasting of “sub-premium” offerings but pressure has been building on Arm from OEM partners to provide a cheap but effective GPU to power decent gaming graphics across even lower cost mobiles, and cut energy use by up to 30 percent at the same time.
The powerful new Mali-G78 GPU is Arm’s favoured headline. This boosts cores from 16 to 24 (vs the G77) and offering something called “Asynchronous Top Level” that means performance can be delivered efficiently across all the cores in order to maximise performance productivity, particularly for games.
(With an eye on rising mobile gameplay of titles like Fortnite, Arm particularly emphasises the improved performance to “complex gaming scenes featuring smoke, grass and trees”; no doubt other imagery performs better too).
OEMs have been keen on cheap, small alternatives too.
Arm has responded with the Mali-G68 GPU line. As the company put it today, the “new sub-premium GPU tier was developed after we listened to our partners who wanted to scale premium features and technology across their portfolio of devices. This helps to bring premium use-cases, like high-performance gaming, to a wider audience of developers and consumers.
“In addition, our partners wanted a cost reduction in the design and layout work required for the multiple GPU designs. Mali-G68 allows them to reuse their design work and scale them down to a lower silicon area.”
That new line was among a flurry of releases today, including the new Cortex-A78 CPU, Cortex-X Custom program and the Nali-G78 GPU.
A new custom programme is also being touted.
This lets partners work with Arm engineering teams, to “shape a final CPU product to meet their specific market demands.
“This allows program partners to define their own performance points outside of the usual Cortex-A design envelope of performance, power, and area (PPA). This final custom CPU, designed and built by Arm, will then be delivered under the Arm Cortex-X brand”, Arm said today.
Samsung was among those welcoming the move.
“Samsung and Arm have a strong technology partnership and we are very excited to see the new direction Arm is taking with Cortex-X Custom program, enabling innovation in the Android ecosystem for next-gen user experiences” said Joonseok Kim, VP of the design team at Samsung Electronics.
Partners can check out the specs of the all new releases here.
