What is the key to achieving the perfect balance between power and efficiency? ARM Mali GPU gives you the answer

Some devices and applications need to pursue the highest performance of the graphics processor to meet their requirements, while other devices, applications or use cases need to reduce power consumption as much as possible to provide longer battery operation time and run in all-in-one devices with limited heat dissipation capacity. So, how to choose between fish and bear's paw?

The Mali team isn’t going to compromise on one thing over the other, and we’ve achieved that status as the world’s number one shipping GPU in part because it’s able to address every use case across the spectrum: from the most powerful VR headsets that require lightning-fast refresh rates to tiny smartwatches that need to work as long as possible, Mali GPUs are everywhere.

The Mali family has three product roadmaps: ultra-low power , area-efficient , and high-performance . These groupings allow partners to easily select the right product group based on device requirements.

The Ultra Low Power family includes the Mali-400 GPU, one of ARM's pioneering GPU families, which remains the world's most popular GPU with over 25% market share. The latest product in this roadmap is the Mali-470, which features advanced power-saving features to deliver smartphone-quality graphics on low-power devices such as wearables and IoT applications. It consumes half the power of the already ultra-efficient Mali-400, further improving device battery life and extending end-user usage time.

The Area Efficient roadmap focuses on delivering the best performance in the smallest possible silicon area to reduce the production cost of mass-market smartphones, tablets and digital TVs. The flagship products in this roadmap include the Mali-T820 and Mali-T830, a pair that combines the cost and power-saving features of its predecessor, the Mali-T720, with the power of the high-performance Mali-T860, which was released at the same time. The first few cost-effective ARM Mali GPUs feature ARM frame buffer compression, which is a huge leap forward in the flexibility of balancing power and performance.

The products in the High Performance roadmap are exactly what you would expect and deserve. They are the latest and greatest GPU designs that optimize performance for high-end use cases and premium mobile devices. The Mali-T880 is the highest performance GPU, based on ARM’s state-of-the-art Midgard architecture, and is used in many of today’s premium devices, including the Samsung Galaxy S7, Huawei P9 smartphones, and a wide range of amazing standalone VR products. You may have recently heard about our new high-performance GPU, the Mali-G71, that was introduced to the market. The change in naming reflects that the Mali GPU architecture has reached a new level with the Bifrost architecture. As the successor to Midgard, Bifrost is strategically designed to support Vulkan, a new graphics API from Khronos that gives developers more control and a great new feature set specifically suited for mobile graphics. Not only that, it is also designed to exceed the requirements of today’s premium content, such as 360 video and high-end games, and to support the demanding requirements of emerging industries such as virtual reality, augmented reality, and computer vision.

The Mali family of products is inherently flexible, and much of this comes from built-in scalability. The Mali-400 is the first dual-core product from the Mali-200 GPU, and it’s clear that many products can be derived this way. High-end Midgard-based GPUs such as the Mali-T860 and Mali-T880 are scalable from a single core to 16 cores, which gives partners more options. In today’s high-end smartphones, we’ve seen configurations with up to 12 available cores, which can support specific use cases such as mobile VR, and it’s the demand that is pushing mobile power limits to new records. Mali-G71 is a new GPU with the Bifrost architecture, which takes another quantum leap forward, with the ability to scale up to 32 cores. The additional options are necessary to not only easily support today’s advanced use cases such as mobile VR, but also to have more power to accommodate the growing content complexity we see every day.

After the customer sets the number of cores they need, there is still a lot of flexibility in the configuration itself. The balance between power, performance and efficiency in the chipset implementation provides another level of customisable options. The following figures illustrate a basic example of the flexibility inherent in configuring a single Mali-based chipset, but this is just a glimpse of the scope.

Example optimization points for a single Mali GPU

How to best balance power and efficiency is an old and deep-rooted problem in the industry, and ARM is ready to solve it with the flexibility and scalability of the Mali series.