Bringing Mali, the Android GPU of Choice, to Wearables
Edvard Sørgård
ARM Tech Symposia China 2015
Senior Principal Graphics Architect / ARM
November 2015
© ARM 2015 2
ARM Mali GPU success
Total
114
licenses 73 licensees
25 new Mali
licenses
in FY14
Mali is in
75% of DTVs…
…
>50% of Android™
tablets…
…
>35% of smartphones
0
100
200
300
400
500
600
2011 2012 2013 2014
Mill
ion u
nits
550M Mali–based GPUs
shipped in 2014
© ARM 2015 3
Mali™ graphics in low-power mobile today
Smartphone Wearable Mali-400 GPU
Mali-450 GPU
Mali-T720 GPU
Mali-T820 GPU
Mali-T830 GPU
Mali-T760 GPU
Mali-T860 GPU
Mali-T880 GPU
Entry-level
High-end
OpenGL® ES 2.0
OpenGL ES 3.1
OpenGL ES 3.2 *
Vulkan TM **
Mid-range
High-end
Mali-400
GPU MP1
Mali-400
GPU MP2
OpenGL ES 2.0
* Products are based on a published Khronos specification and are expected to pass the Khronos Conformance Process when available. Current conformance status can be found at www.khronos.org/conformance.
** Products are expected to support Vulkan once finalized. Current specification status can be found at www.khronos.org/vulkan.
© ARM 2015 4
Why OpenGL ES 2.0? Every pixel matters!
Dissecting a modern user interface
Programmable
shaders allow
control of every
pixel
Animated icons
Blended text and
icons with
wallpaper
Wallpaper may be
live/animated
Arbitrary
scaling,
translations,
rotations of any
object
Controlled by
multi-touch
gestures
3D widgets
convey
information at a
glance and
provide
intuitive control
functions
© ARM 2015 5
Why OpenGL ES 2.0? Energy-efficiency
OpenGL ES 2.0 provides a balance of per pixel control and energy-
efficiency
OpenGL ES 2.0 is used within the Android™, Android Wear and
Tizen™ operating systems
For rich user interfaces, mapping, casual gaming, etc., OpenGL ES 2.0 is the de-facto
standard and is mandatory for many operating systems
Other versions of OpenGL ES have introduced a number of additional features to
support immersive video games, but the OpenGL ES 2.0 feature level is most efficient
for user interfaces
© ARM 2015 6
Wearable requirements (1)
Battery life
1 week minimum between charges
Small form factor
Display size typically 1.5 to 1.7 inch diagonal
Aesthetically pleasing, much more visible than a phone
This also limits battery size
© ARM 2015 7
Wearable requirements (2)
Includes ambient or rest modes of operation due to long periods with
no conscious user interaction
Implies low-leakage and/or power-gated hardware
Graphics are simpler, using less geometry than Smartphones
Display size too small for complex 3D games
320x320 (300 PPI) today, but growing
© ARM 2015 8
Wearable requirements (3)
30FPS or higher in interactive modes
Maintaining the slick user interface (UI) experience expected from Smartphones
Orders of magnitude less in ambient or rest modes
Up to three full screen layers
© ARM 2015 9
Mali-470: Halving the power consumption
The Mali-470 GPU halves the power
consumption of graphics processing
when compared to Mali-400
Supports OpenGL® ES 2.0 and 1.1
with leading area-efficiency
Updated implementation of the
Mali-400 series graphics processor
architecture called Utgard that
powers more than a billion devices
© ARM 2015 10
Mali-470 development teams (1)
Mali-470 was developed as a close collaboration of ARM Norway’s
hardware designers and ARM Shanghai’s driver developers
The original designers of the Mali-400 GPU and Mali-450 GPU have
helped architect many of the Mali GPUs that followed
They used the experience and technology gained from these
developments in the design of Mali-470
© ARM 2015 11
Mali-470 development teams (2)
A key objective was to keep driver changes to a minimum
A driver stack that has shipped in over a billion devices has a high level
of stability and optimisation that we were keen to retain
An extensive range of real-world applications were used throughout the
design process to tune the energy-efficiency of the Mali-470 graphics
processor
Verification process placed emphasis on user interfaces
© ARM 2015 12
Mali-470 GPU design changes
Quad-thread scheduling optimizations
Frequency of control and state updates
significantly reduced
Centralizing per-quad state to reduce state
clocking through pipe
Microarchitectural optimizations
Pipeline improvements make aggressive use of
clock-gating, including clock-gating L1 caches
Bypassing functional blocks whenever not
required to progress instruction execution
Datapath optimizations
Targeted use of fixed point arithmetic
Updated in Mali-470
Updated in Mali-450
Interfaces compatible with Mali-400
© ARM 2015 13
Continued innovation on the Mali-470 GPU
Energy-efficiency (FPS/mW) increases
2x vs Mali-400
Supports the latest version of
Android™, Android Wear and other
Linux kernel –based operating
systems
Up to 4 pixel processors can be
implemented
Multi-core design supports screen resolutions
from 640x640 to 1080p at 60FPS 32bpp
Norm
alis
ed E
nerg
y-effic
iency
(FPS/
mW
)
Mali-400
1.0
2.0
1.3
Mali-450 Mali-470
© ARM 2015 14
Summary
With Mali-470 we have a significant update to the Utgard GPU
Architecture that is an excellent fit for Wearables
The Mali-470 graphics processor halves the power consumption
Expanding the smartphone experience into a wider range of devices
Thank You
The trademarks featured in this presentation are registered and/or unregistered trademarks of ARM Limited (or its
subsidiaries) in the EU and/or elsewhere. All rights reserved. All other marks featured may be trademarks of their
respective owners.
Copyright © 2015 ARM Limited
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