TECH:: High performance GPU...

Graphics Processing Unit - ARM

Even high performance GPU has been focus for most of the companies. After the nVidia, Arm is bullish on MALI Graphics Processing Unit(GPU) as can be seen here -

http://www.arm.com/products/multimedia/mali-graphics-hardware/mali-t678.php

In fact, as I could gather Arm started the GPU design when it acquired FALAnx -

http://www.arm.com/about/newsroom/13706.php

Obviously, it's a great vision of Arm which focused on integrating the GPU with CPU as next generation is turning towards http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPGPU. What it means is that - "General-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU, GPGP or less often GP²U) shall replace the CPU or handles all the traditional operations which is till date handled by CPU."

"Contnuing the MALI advancements, ARM is launching even higher performance GPU named T678 (after T658, T628....) which is the latest addition based on the Midgard architecture and builds on proven technology leadership. Mali-T678 is the GPU of choice for use in the next generation of market-leading devices, optimized to bring breathtaking graphical displays to consumer applications such as 3D graphics, visual computing, augmented reality, procedural texture generation and voice recognition."

                                                                         *source : http://www.arm.com







 The Mali-T678 delivers the highest Mali-T600 series performance to date, achieved by doubling the number of GPU cores, doubling the number of arithmetic pipelines within each core and improving the compiler and pipeline efficiency.

The ARM Mali-T678 GPU supports multiple Compute APIs, including Khronos® OpenCL,Google Renderscript compute and Microsoft DirectCompute. It provides native hardware support for 64-bit scalar and vector, integer and floating-point data types - fundamental to accelerate complex and computationally intensive algorithms. Maintains complete support for Khronos APIs across the Mali-T600 series of GPUs.

The Job Manager within Mali-T600 Series GPUs offloads task management from the CPU to the GPU and enables seamless load balancing across active shader cores. Concurrent delivery of a common set of compatible drivers for all Midgard architecture-based Mali GPUs enables faster time-to-market and minimizes software upgrade costs for future implementations.



Basically the tile based rendering has an edge when it comed to better performance GPU operations. The GPU is gaining although a comparative study to what exists in the marker is not available oftenly.

~D