Intel named as partner for latest ARM graphics core
Bitter rivals in rare appearance on same ecosystem slide, as eight-core Mali promises tenfold boost for mobile graphics
Published: 10 November, 2011
ARM says its latest Mali core design for graphics processors will boost their performance tenfold when the chips appear in smartphones from 2013. And it has aroused speculation of a truce with Intel, at least on one front, by naming the US giant as a semiconductor partner within the 'Mali graphics ecosystem'.
Intel was listed on a slide under that title, part of a presentation distributed at the launch of the Mali-T658 graphics core. Intel is at loggerheads with ARM in the CPU market, and is a licensee and investor in Imagination Technologies, which produces the main rival to Mali, Power VR. Intel is also reported to have an internal graphics development project ongoing to enhance its own capabilities in this area. So it would be surprising if it intends to make Mali strategic to its own push into the mobile devices sector, though the relationship may have been inherited with its acquisition of Infineon's wireless unit.
ARM claims to have 57 Mali licences with 43 partners, 10 of them already paying royalties. Last year it added Samsung to its list, even though the Korean giant had been using PowerVR - indeed, Samsung, along with LG, Nufront and Fujitsu Semiconductor, is named as the lead development partner for the new graphics core.
However, Imagination professed itself unconcerned at the time, and its nonchalance proves to have been at least partly justified - it announced this week that is has signed an additional licensing deal with Samsung, for IP from its PowerVR SGX MP multiprocessor graphics family. This will be deployed in multiple systems-on-chip for mobile and consumer devices. According to EETimes, as graphics become more crucial to differentiating mobile chips, several players are pursuing dual-platform strategies, including ST-Ericsson.
ARM will be trying to tempt such customers with its latest Mali line, which supports up to eight cores, doubling the four cores of the current T604. The UK firm has also doubled the number of arithmetic pipelines per shader core from two to four. All this should result in up to 10 times better graphics performance than GPUs based on Mali-400, the current mainstream version, and four times that of the T604, the current high end core, which will appear in commercial silicon next year. The new core will also be targeted at tablets, smart TVs and in-car systems.
The Mali-T658 will also be able to work alongside the newly announced 'big-little' combination of two CPUs, the Cortex-A15 and A7, said ARM. That approach dynamically balances tasks between the different cores, offloading routine tasks to the lower power element, and with the T658 able to do some computation tasks such as image processing, it will be able to be part of the mix too. The ARM CoreLink system IP supports clusters of multicore processors, including the Cortex-A15 and Mali-T658.
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