ARM's Mali GPU Could Bring 1080p To Phones

While ARM's latest onslaught of announcements have been quite remarkable, we'd say that all of them combined can't measure up to the magnitude of this one. Today, the company famous for its Cortex processors has announced the Mali graphics processing unit (GPU) technology while simultaneously laying out its vision to "shape the future of next generation of graphics processing and mobile gaming." Interested? Read on.

The company is making its proclamation from the 22nd annual Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco, where it has described that this Mali system has the potential to bring 1080p playback to cellphones and other portable players. In fact, the Mali GPU family scales from Mali-55 -- the worlds smallest GPU -- to Mali-400 MP, the highest-performance embedded multicore GPU IP on the market which supports complex gaming applications at up to 1080p high-definition resolution.

What's interesting is that Mali itself has been around under ARM since 2006, but not until now has the product evolved enough to make a serious dent in the industry. ARM's hoping to "lead the next era of mobile gaming," which ought to get the R&D lines humming over at NVIDIA. If nothing else, the iPhone has proven that gaming on cellphones is a market with growth potential, and while Nokia never did have much luck with its N-Gage iniative, it also didn't have the App Store in its back pocket. Heck, ARM even asserts that these minuscule chips can deliver 3D graphics with 4x and 16x full scene anti-aliasing -- something seen as impossible just a year or two ago.

Now, who's up for producing a 3" 1080p panel...that anyone over the age of 25 won't be able to see icons on?