ARM has unveiled the Mali-T658, a mobile GPU for high-end smartphones, tablets and TVs.
The Mali-T658 is the second in the Midgard lineup, following the T604, which in turn follows the Mali-400 MP GPU - currently used in our A List smartphone, the Samsung Galaxy S II.
The Mali-T658 promises ten times the graphics performance power of the Mali-400 MP GPU, and four times the performance of the T604, ARM said.
The Mali-T658 scales up to eight cores, twice the core count of the T604, but will use the same drivers and software as its Midgard sibling, meaning the system is backwards compatible.
"We've achieved performance leadership over the competition... we're again the new benchmark, and ARM is in a leadership position," said Ian Smythe, director of marketing for the media processing division.
He said the GPUs would allow for more life-like graphics on better resolution screens. "We're going to see a huge increase in pixels," he said. "It's kind of a double whammy effect: we're going to get more pixels to push and it's going to get more complicated to push each one of them."
The T658 could enable technologies such as augmented reality, gestures and more, he said. "I also expect to see things that I don't expect - the competition is so fierce people [OEMs] will keep experimenting to differentiate," he said. "We're giving them the technology to do that."
The Mali-T658 is designed to work with ARM's CPUs, the Cortex-A15 and Cortex-A7, alongside its big.LITTLE system, which uses a smaller core for less intensive work to save energy use.
The GPUs will take at least 18 months to start showing up in products, but Smythe said the Mali-T658 designs were already in the hands of at least one partner.
This article originally appeared at pcpro.co.uk
