ARM announced the second generation of the Mali-T600 Series GPUs targeting tablets, smartphones and smart TVs. Those new GPUs provide up to 50% performance increase over the first generation Midgard GPUs (T-604 & T-658) and include support for Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression (ASTC), a texture compression technique. The company explains that ASTC significantly optimizes GPU performance and increases battery life in devices.
Those 3 new GPUs based on Mali Midgard architecture are named as follows:
- Mali-T624 – 1 to 4 cores – Market: Smartphones and smart-Tvs
- Mali-T628 – 5 to 8 cores – Market: Smartphones and smart-Tvs
- Mali-T678 – Up to 8 cores, 4x the GPU compute performance of Mali-T628 – Market: Tablets
As with previous Midgard GPUs, the new GPUs support GPU compute with improves performance and energy-efficiency for math intensive activities, such as:
- Computational photography – computational methods of enhancing or extending digital photography
- Multi perspective views – the ability to have multiple views from different positions
- Real-time photo editing on mobile devices – photo editing at your fingertips on your smartphone, tablet, etc.
All products are designed to support the following APIs; OpenGL ES 1.1, OpenGL ES 2.0, OpenGL ES 3.0, DirectX 11 FL 9_3, DirectX 11, OpenCL 1.1 Full Profile and Google Renderscript compute.
If you’ve never heard about OpenGL ES 3.0 (codenamed Halti), that’s normal, it has only been officially announced yesterday, and there is no readily available silicon that support it yet. You can, however, write and test OpenGL ES 3.0 programs using the OpenGL ES 3.0 emulator.
Those new GPUs appear to have already been licensed by several silicon vendors such as Fujitsu Semiconductor, MediaTek, Rockchip, Nufront and Samsung Electronics, and should be available in SoCs by next year, and in retail products by the end of 2013 or early 2014.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
Support CNX Software! Donate via cryptocurrencies, become a Patron on Patreon, or purchase goods on Amazon or Aliexpress
