Pallab’s Place

ARM just introduced a new high performance, low power, graphics core that can be instanced as multicore for up to eight instances as a GPU in the Midgard architecture for sub 32nm process. The Midgard architecture now has the T604 and T658 as multi-core visual computing cores. The two main features of the new core are the ability to scale to 8 shader and arithmetic pipes in one core and an extensive API library that allows for commonality of code across multiple platforms (mobile to large screen TV).

ARM Mali T658 GPU Architecure

The multi-core architecture required a new cache system to provide increased coherency for the 8 cores. They are grouped as a single cache shared with 4 shader cores sharing a memory management unit and an AMBA interface. The core now supports an integrated automatic load balancer for the cores. The target mobile applications is superphones in either a quad or octal configuration with the “big-little” CPU cores the Cortex-A15/A7 pairing.

The shader set supports graphics APIs – Direct X10 & X11, OpenGL, OpenVG and computer APIs – OpenCL, Renderscript and DirectCompute. The APIs have already been incorporated in to several development systems including the game development tools from Unity.

As the IP block is targeted for implementation in licensee SOCs, multi-stream data access, incorporation and support of a hypervisor, vitalization of the memory access and multi-display drive are currently not part of the IP block, but are being developed the partners in the ARM ecosystems for vertical market specific needs.

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