ARM Mali T658 to bring console-class gaming to mobiles

November 11, 2011 | Filed under: Technology | Posted by:

(Nvonews.com)

Kids, and for that matter many adults, often grab a new mobile phone and look for the games icon. This is excellent news for such gamers who do not own or can carry a console with them all the time. Chip designer ARM has just announced that its next generation mobile GPU, the Mali-T658 can offer a gaming experience that would be ten times better than, say, the Samsung Galaxy S II.

Ten times means that the current GPU, Mali-400 MP, would be ten times slower than its next gen.
The GPU has used an architecture called Midgard. Midgard supports both 3D workloads using modern APIs—it supports both OpenGL ES and Microsoft’s Direct3D 11—and computation workloads using OpenCL, Microsoft DirectCompute, and Google RenderScript. Midgard also supports full IEEE 754 floating point to help in computer tasks.

The design T604 was seen last year. It embodies three textures of arithmetic, load/store. The core contains four arithmetic pipelines, and one each of load/store and texture. This doubles the number of arithmetic pipelines found in T604. Into this GPU about eight cores can be integrated , doubling the previous experience that grouped four cores.

This enables the GPU to give a performance that is at par with that of the PlayStation 3. Mali-400 MP is said to offer about 30 million triangles per second. At ten times this offer, T658 would give about 300 million triangles per second. And compared to this PlayStation 3 has performance of about 250 million-300 million triangles per second.

Besides ARM, GPU world is dominated by PowerVR SGX 543MP2. It comes in iPhone 4S, and boasts two cores offering about 35 million triangles per second each. Future generations promise somewhere around 380 million triangles per second in PowerVR’s Series 6 and up to 200 million triangles per second in Marvell’s Armada 628.

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