ARM on Tuesday unveiled two new graphics chip designs with one that will allow for up to 16 processing cores. It’ll still be a couple more years before the Mali-T760 GPU (high-end) and the Mali-T720 GPU (low-end) show up in mobile devices but when they do, they’ll deliver a host of improvements compared to current generation mobile GPUs.
Aside from the fact that it’ll have 16 cores (today’s iPhone 5s utilizes just four GPU cores), each core in the Mali T760 will boast more performance. What’s more, ARM says the unit will be roughly 400 percent more efficient than current generation Mali chips thanks to better memory designs and the use of transaction elimination, or essentially eliminating unnecessary calculations.
One example of this is that the GPU will only redraw parts of the screen that change during a video or animation. The Mali-T720, meanwhile, will be used in midrange and entry-level phones and tablets and will deliver GPU Compute and OpenGL ES 3.0 to cheaper devices. More performance, more features and greater efficiency – what’s not to like about that?
As they do today, ARM plans to license the GPU designs to customers that will in turn use them in their own line of smartphones and tablets. At present, ARM boasts 84 licensees spread across 56 different partners. More than 150 million Mali GPUs shipped last year and around 300 million have already shipped this year.
Devices powered by the duo of new ARM GPUs are expected to arrive ahead of the Mobile World Congress event in Spain in February 2015.
