Items tagged with Mali
Last week, Arm showed off the inner workings of its new Machine Learning Processor design, but that is not all that company had waiting in the wings. Arm is also detailing more cutting-edge technology in the form of its Cortex-A76 CPU, Mali-G76 GPU, and Mali-V76 VPU designs. All three chips are slated to be heavy-hitters in their respective categories, and thanks to some on-campus, in depth briefings earlier this month, we have all of the details to share... Cortex A-76 The Cortex-A76 represents Arm’s most radical overhaul over previous designs. The A76’s brand-new architecture brings decisive improvements to power and efficiency. Arm’s processor engineers worked with a...
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ARM has announced its next generation of graphics hardware (codenamed Mali). The new GPUs are meant to highlight a significant improvement in energy efficiency, with ARM claiming that its next-generation GPU architecture will be a whopping 45% more power efficient than previous models. The new GPUs are also meant to address a broad array of market needs, with products scaling from entry level devices to midrange and high-end products. Note that in the fine print, ARM states that the T860 is designed to be 45% more efficient than the older T628 at the same process node and with the same configuration. The chip can scale up to 16 coherent shader cores with native support for 10bit color, DirectX...
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One of the trickiest aspects to launching a major new platform update is the chicken and egg problem. Without any hardware to test on or take advantage of, developers are leery of committing to supporting new hardware features. Without software that takes advantage of new hardware capabilities, customers aren't willing to pay for new equipment. We normally think about this problem as strictly an end-user issue, but it actually pops up in multiple contexts -- it's tougher to sell chip designers on a major microarchitecture update if they can't experiment with the product first. Today, ARM is tackling the issue at the manufacturer and design level with a new development platform, codenamed Juno....
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Earlier this week we covered a deal between Intel and Rockchip that will combine Intel's Atom with Rockchip's graphics IP and considerable share of the Chinese market. I'm returning to the topic because there are some interesting big-picture facets to this move that we didn't cover with the initial announcement. Over the long term, this partnership could transform Intel's entire mobile division -- or cause it no end of headaches in the future. First, in order to partner with Rockchip, Intel must have definitionally granted the company some form of x86 license. This wouldn't necessarily be a license to design its own x86 processors (in fact, it almost certainly isn't), but the only way for Rockchip...
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Dash Budget Android Phones From BLU Bring More Smartphone Users Into The Fold, Start At $49 Unlocked
Earlier this year, BLU Products introduced a pair of unlocked smartphones that cost $199 off-contract, and the company is back with three more handsets at even lower price points; the least expensive of the group, the Dash Jr, costs just $49 unlocked. BLU CEO Samuel Ohev-Zion put the company’s goal succinctly in a press release by saying, “Almost 1 billion feature phones are going to be shipped this year. Our job is to facilitate the transition from feature phones by bringing affordable internet and smartphone connectivity to consumers without compromise on quality, user experience and overall satisfaction." Thus, although the new Dash phones won’t blow anyone away with killer...
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Samsung announced the next generation of its Exynos processors with the Exynos 5 Octa 5420 chip, which boasts even more CPU and graphics processing power than previous editions. In fact, Samsung says that the new chip offers 20% better CPU processing and double the graphics firepower of any other Exynos 5 Octa. The Exynos 5 Octa uses four ARM Cortex-A15 (1.8GHz) and four Cortex-A7 (1.3GHz) processors in a big.LITTLE setup as well as ARM Mali-T628 MP6 graphics. It also features 14.9GBps memory bandwidth and 933MHz dual-channel LPDDR3 and supports 1080p HD video recording and playback at 60 FPS. And of course, power efficiency is at the forefront of the design. "Demand for richer graphic experiences...
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While Intel is the king of the PC, competitor ARM is arguably the king of mobile, and the latter is apparently further securing its crown with a new optimized IP solution that’s designed for use in midrange mobile devices. ARM executives went so far as to tell TechHive that their offerings are a generation ahead of Intel’s. Assuming that’s true, it’s especially bad news for Intel because the chipmaker just launched its new 22nm Atom solution. ARM’s latest consists of an a Cortex-A12 processor with a Mali-T622 GPU and a Mali -V500 (which is a multi-core video solution that, among other things, fast encoding/decoding to better handle higher-resolution content). ARM's...
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Remember the graphical wars in the early days of consoles? 8-bit, then 16-bit, then 32-bit, then 64-bit, then 128-bit. The race to the top never stopped, and even today, the longing for more pronounced technology keeps the dream alive. The same sort of drive is seen in the processor game as well. ARM has just launched the second generation of Mali-T600 GPUs, which are said to provide "a dramatically improved user experience for tablets, smartphones and smart-TVs." If you're looking for intense performance gains, you'll find them. Each one of the new GPUs offers a staggering 50% increase in performance, and they are also the first to include Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression (ASTC), a texture...
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Mediatek, a long standing partner of ARM, has licensed the company's Mali-400 GPU and will be using it in upcoming handheld and portable devices such as media players and personal navigation devices. This might not really sound like much, but this is the first major Mali-400 licensing announcement since the technology was launched back in June 2008. Mali-400 traces its ancestry back to Falanx, a Norwegian graphics IP company that originally came up with the whole Mali series, which was – obviously – acquired by ARM. The company boasts its low power consumption and high performance – claiming it can provide HD video decode (1080p) for a fraction of the power.The Mali-400 GPU measures...
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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...
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Mozilla is thinking of allowing its users to automatically block websites, identified by Google as a risk for malicious downloads, in their next generation web brower. Google collects lists of presumably malicious webpages using information gathered by Stopbadware.org, Lenovo, and Sun. It's not a done deal, but if so it would amount essentially to Google having veto power over Firefox browsed webpages. If the security tool makes it into Firefox 3.0's final build, Mozilla will rely on long-time partner Google to provide the blocking blacklists. Google already does that for Firefox 2.0's anti-phishing feature, which is powered by the search giant's open-source "Safe Browsing" code. (Safe...
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