Arm has unveiled the new Immortalis family of flagship GPUs with support for hardware-based ray tracing starting with the Immortalis-G715 GPU, as well as two new premium Mali GPUs namely Arm Mali-G615 and Mali-G715.
Software-based ray tracing was already implemented on Arm Mali G710 on SoC’s such as the MediaTek Dimensity 9000, but the hardware-based ray tracing in the Immortalis-G715 delivers over 300 percent performance improvements, and only uses 4% of the shader core area. This will be mostly used in games to generate realistic lighting and shadows as can be seen in the “before vs after” video demo below.
While hardware-based ray tracing is only available on the Immortalis-G715 GPU, all three new GPUs feature a new execution engine and support variable rate shading. The Immortalis-G715 flagship GPU will come with 10 or more cores, the Mali-G715 with 6 to 9 cores, and the Mali-G615 with 6 cores or less.
Variable Rate Shading is a new graphics feature that provides significant energy savings and a performance boost by only rendering the parts that need it (e.g. where the action takes place) at a fine pixel granularity. So for example, the background scenery may be rendered with a more coarse pixel granularity. The technique will lower power consumption and improve performance with Arm having seen improvements of up to 40 percent on frames per second (FPS).
The new execution engine has gone through power efficiency improvement with a fused multiply-add (FMA) block now capable of delivering twice the computer performance with only a 27 percent area increase, and the addition of Matrix Multiply instruction helping deliver a doubling of ML performance just from architectural changes.
Arm also says graphics performance has improved by 15% (ISO process), while being 15% more efficient. SoCs featuring the new GPUs should become available in 2023, but we’ll talk more about that in the next post.
More details may be found in the announcement and a more technical blog post.
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.
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Quite frankly, they need to replace the marketing team in charge of finding names. Giving a new chip with new capabilities the same model number as the lower one is moronic at best. Devs and bug reports will continue to say “It says it needs a G715”. “Mali or Immortalis ?”. “Pfff no idea what you’re talking about”. It will be even worse if Mali evolves faster and releases, say, the G735 before the other one. Some will say “needs at least a G715, I have a G735 but doesn’t work”. These are probably the same team who coined the name “aarch64” that many continue to refer to “arm64” because it’s simpler to spell, write and pronounce.
Yes, this is ridiculous. In their shoes I would have gone with “Deathlessas” or maybe “Evergreenos”.
This is the reason you don’t want to use social networks or watch TV: avoid all the stupid ideas the marketish want to put in your head.