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ARM Unveils Three Second-Generation Mali GPUs

Posted by samzenpus on from the new-on-the-scene dept.

Barence writes "ARM has taken the lid off three new Mali T600 graphics chips that form the second generation of its mobile Midgard architecture. Designed for use in smartphones, tablets and smart TVs, the three chips range from four to eight cores, improve performance by 'up to 50%' and offer greater efficiency. ARM expects devices to begin appearing with the chips this time next year."

8 of 29 comments (clear)

  1. That's fast! by Hatta · · Score: 4, Funny

    That's like 20 Mali GPUs generated per minute, or 1200 per hour.

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    1. Re:That's fast! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      They are recompiled from HDL (Hardware Descriptive Langauge), so making up a new one can be as fast as a new FireFox rev.

  2. Works for me by rickb928 · · Score: 2

    I won't be elegible for a subsidized upgrade until this time next year.

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  3. Open source drivers? by Curupira · · Score: 5, Informative
    It seems that ARM will soon release open source drivers for those babies...
    Unfortunatelly, they will not be *fully* open source:

    For the ARM Mali T6xx Linux enablement, they are only using a DRM driver for driving the display controller while they have their own separate kernel driver for poking and handling the GPU itself. ARM though isn't being too open-source friendly in terms of a fully open stack or providing proper documentation.

    Good grief.

    1. Re:Open source drivers? by serviscope_minor · · Score: 3, Informative

      Unfortunatelly, they will not be *fully* open source:

      Shame.

      It's silly really. Intel have shown that OSS 3D drivers are perfectly feasible.

      Actually, the Intel graphics are pretty much the best choice unless you need high performance for something due to the extremely solid and reliable nature of them.

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    2. Re:Open source drivers? by oakgrove · · Score: 4, Informative

      Doesn't really have anything to do with being new. All modern ARM GPUs have closed drivers. That's part of the reason it can be a bitch getting newer Android on older handsets sometimes. If you look here at the binary blob page for the Google Nexus devices you will notice that all of the devices except for the Nexus One have a binary for the GPU and most for Wifi/Bluetooth. This despite the fact that Google has professed a strong desire to have the hardware be completely open. Hopefully this will change at some point as this hurts the efforts of porting standard Linux distros to things like the Xoom but as of right now you can forget open source in the ARM space.

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    3. Re:Open source drivers? by mikael · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It's been mentioned before . Many times the hardware may have features that are not yet fully developed or licensed. I remember Nvidia saying this about Linux driver and shader languages - that GLSL wasn't licensed for Linux or something. Then you have patent trolls who will jump at every keyword as evidence that you are violating the patents they bought off craigslist or ebay. Your mention of "geometry tree" might mean list of vertices, To them, it's their super-spiffy collision detection algorithm, so you end with paying lawyers large sums of money to fight it out on your behalf. You might also get the odd nutter or academic department who will go off and patent a future feature enhancement documented in the comments.

      Like the early days of the PC, somebody figured out a way of reprogramming the real-time clock to drive 8 Kilohertz interrupts so low-quality sound could be played on the internal speaker. They actually patented it, even though it completely scrambled all file update and creation times.

      Given the rate of change that is going on (GLES 3.0 is out today, it would be very confusing for developers if ARM had one version of the driver that supported the current standard, and the user community has their own with custom extensions.

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  4. Re:battery life... by espiesp · · Score: 2

    Not sure if you're trolling or just woefully unaware of the state of smartphones, but my Original Motorola Droid A855 from Nov 2009 (which I still use as my primary mobile) has a PowerVR discrete GPU. To this day the battery life is still tolerable on the original battery, but I also cut my smartphone teeth on the UTStarcom PPC6700 and later HTC 6800 so I knew what I was in for.

    Lets fast forward nearly 3 years and compare my Droid to the Motorola Droid Razr Maxx. Huge screen, faster in every possible way, and probably 2-3 times the battery life. Granted, the Maxx is at the head of the class, but even the regular Razr is bigger and better than the Droid A855 but still has comparable battery life on a comparable size battery.

    If that isn't progress, I don't know what is.