Executive Summary

Users continue to demand more from their mobile devices and many mobile device designers are using Mali-T604-based SoC products today to meet those ever-increasing demands. Additionally, designers are starting to enable and enhance mobile device user experiences through GPU compute.  OEMs and software vendors are investing to accelerate image processing, computational photography, game physics, and video processing for both internal and external high-resolution displays. ARM’s Mali-T600 series of graphics processing units (GPUs) are ARM’s first GPU compute cores designed for license by a wide range of system-on-chip (SoC) manufacturers.  Mali-T600 series GPUs enable software developers through mainstream OpenCL and Android Renderscript compute software development environments.  Additionally, Mali-T600 series GPUs are the first OpenCL 1.1 Full Profile conformant mobile class IP licensable GPUs shipping in widely available consumer products. The Mali-T622 GPU is the latest addition to ARM’s second-generation Mali-T600 Series, which has the same performance using half the power consumption of ARM’s first-generation Mali-T604.  The Mali-T622 GPU broadens the product range of the Mali-T600 Series from performance tablets down to midrange smartphones.  Software developers can use existing Mali-T604-based products to develop new user experience applications for all second-generation Mali-T600 Series GPUs. ARM’s Mali-T600 series GPUs will enable mobile device designers to offer higher value, differentiated user experiences within a balanced power budget.  The first generation of target user experiences include:

• smoother and seamless entertainment,
• realtime audio and video communications and recording,
• better security, voice and gesture control, and
• augmented reality.

This balance of compute performance and low power consumption will enable superior performance over prior generations of mobile devices without generating a lot of heat and without reducing battery life.

Table of Contents

1. Hardware Enables New Mobile User Experiences
2. The Balance of Power
3. Mali GPU Compute Today
4. Application-Specific Acceleration
5. ARM Mali GPUs
6. GPU Compute In The Future
7. Call to Action
8. Subject Matter Experts Interviewed

Disclosures: Moor Insights & Strategy provides research, analysis, advising, and consulting to many high-tech companies, including ARM, who commissioned this paper. No employees at the firm hold any equity positions with any companies cited in this documented.