ARM Unveils Three Second-Generation Mali GPUs

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."

Comments

That's fast!

[Hatta]

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

Open source drivers?

[Curupira]

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.

Re:Open source drivers?

[oakgrove]

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.