ARM's New CPU and GPU Will Power Mobile VR In 2017 (theverge.com)

An anonymous cites a story on The Verge: ARM, the company that designs the processor architectures used in virtually all mobile devices on the market, has used Computex Taipei 2016 to announce new products that it expects to see deployed in high-end phones next year. The Cortex-A73 CPU and Mali-G71 GPU are designed to increase performance and power efficiency, with a particular view to supporting mobile VR. ARM says that its Mali line of GPUs are the most widely used in the world, with over 750 million shipped in 2015. The new Mali-G71 is the first to use the company's third-generation architecture, known as Bifrost. The core allows for 50 percent higher graphics performance, 20 percent better power efficiency, and 40 percent more performance per square mm over ARM's previous Mali GPU. With scaling up to 32 shader cores, ARM says the Mali-G71 can match discrete laptop GPUs like Nvidia's GTX 940M. It's also been designed around the specific problems thrown up by VR, supporting features like 4K resolution, a 120Hz refresh rate, and 4ms graphics pipeline latency.

Comments

Mobile chips are the future of VR..

[JMZero]

..but they are not the present. Top-end processor/GPUs are just now getting fast enough for VR to work well. The next generation will be wireless connections to the PC doing the rendering. A fully integrated solution that doesn't suck is at least a couple generations away.

Re:Mobile chips are the future of VR..

[Kjella]

Depends on rendering complexity, I guess. If you can do Super Mario-style graphics well in VR, there could be a niche for that separate from photorealistic VR. Like how the Wii was a big hit despite having the weakest graphics, for more casual players and use as a gimmick.

Re: Mobile chips are the future of VR..

[WarJolt]

I think you don't understand an SoC.

The mobile GPU has an added advantage over a desktop PC. More bandwidth between host memory and device memory. The GPU is basically connected to system memory controller. With desktop GPUs it will always take time to DMA all your data over a PCI express bus. That's great for precaching all your rendering data on the GPU, but it kinda limits how you can design your VR application. It will definitely evolve into Augmented Reality. You'll need a lot of memory bandwidth to combine to real world with the virtual world.

Re: Mobile chips are the future of VR..

[K. S. Kyosuke]

There's definitely special concerns around VR, and I'm sure a custom designed mobile architecture will be able to get some juice out of tight system integration... but you also just need to fill a bunch of polygons at very consistent, very high FPS. Huge dedicated boards in PCs are a lot better at this than tiny low power mobile chips.

Alternatively, you could employ a low-latency eye tracker and selectively degrade the parts of the picture that are currently in the peripheral regions of the user's field of vision. That should work for all three of geometry processing (here you just add two more dimensions to your dynamic LOD), shading, and rasterization. That might turn out to work even better than single screen high resolution displays, since those have to display the whole FOV at high resolution because the machine doesn't know what you're looking at.

Will There be Mali Driver Source?

[LuxuryYacht]

Will There be Mali Driver Source or a way to build for Linux without being tied to only one kernel version? Source is highly unlikely, but it would be nice to have some way to build mali drivers for Linux for other than the one kernel version they pick of if you require an RT kernel for you application. I'd even settle for a tool that modifies their binary so that you can at least build for the kernel version you need vs the only one they chose to release a binary for.