Firstly, a little bit of history for those new to the Mali™ world: ARM® moved into the GPU space in 2006 after acquiring the Norwegian company Falanx Microsystems and their Mali GPU architecture.  ARM had recognized the increasing importance of the graphics market for mobile, automotive and home applications due to the surge in the number of devices with graphics capabilities. ARM aimed to build upon their existing graphics activity and develop integrated solutions for SoCs in multimedia-rich embedded applications, complemented by a collaborative ecosystem of developers.

Now in 2013, we can see the vast inroads that ARM has made. Within the entire of the GPU market for personal mobile devices, the ARM Mali GPU share stood at 18% in 1H13[1], an increase of 37% from 1H12. Furthermore, if we analyze the data for the burgeoning Android™ market we see that ARM Mali GPUs are found in over 70% of Digital Smart TVs, over 50% of Android tablets and over 20% of the Android smartphones. The ARM Mali GPU is, in fact, the world’s number one Android GPU IP supplier and the most widely licensed GPU of all, with over 85 ARM Mali licenses to date. It has experienced more than ten times growth in the past two years, with 2013 looking to ship double the volume of GPUs of 2012 (>300 million units).

So why are companies choosing ARM Mali IP?

ARM’s rapid growth in the GPU market can be laid down to several key factors:

1. Lowering System Power– ARM develops energy efficient IP. To this end ARM Mali engineers are constantly innovating new solutions to reduce the power consumption of our GPUs, delivering to customers IP that enables OEMs to extend the battery life of their mobile and consumer devices. A combination of tile-based and immediate-mode rendering, integrated L2 caches with unified memory access, internal clock gating, multiple levels of job management, GPU Compute functionality and bandwidth-reducing technologies all contribute to making ARM Mali-based SoCs more energy efficient.

2. Coherent ARM-based SoC solutions – With expertise across every element of an SoC,ARM can offer to semiconductor companies IP for every individual component, enabling them to create a complete and holistic SoC solution, including technology (such as ARM POP™ IP) that enables them to get to market faster with superior performance and at a lower cost. ARM Multimedia IP has been intrinsically designed to be simpler to implement with the ubiquitous ARM Cortex® CPU and have also been designed to natively support 64bit and are compatible with the latest ARMv8 IP.

3. Leading on GPU Compute – GPU Compute solutions enable compute-intensive tasks within an application to be offloaded on to the GPU, the processor which is far more efficient at processing massive data-parallel workloads. It enables superior graphics performance and extended battery life and is rapidly becoming the norm for mobile devices, opening up an entire new market for graphics-rich, innovative user experiences. The ARM Mali Midgard architecture is designed to integrate the graphics and compute functionalities together, optimizing interoperation between the two and delivering market leading 3D graphics and general purpose parallel computation. It was the first GPU architecture to bring Full Profile GPU Compute to mobile devices.

4. Reducing complexity –The ARM Mali GPU architecture has been developed to reduce complexity. One single driver stack for all multicore configurations of a GPU simplifies application porting, system integration and maintenance. The provision of an industry standard AMBA^® AXI interface makes integration of an ARM Mali GPU into system-on-chip designs straight-forward, and also provides a well-defined interface for connecting to other bus architectures.  ARM POP IP is also available for certain ARM Mali GPUs to further decrease time to market and improve the dependability of your product. In addition, multicore scheduling and performance scaling is fully handled within the graphics system, with no special considerations required from the application developer.

5. Enabling end-to-end customer solutions– In order for end-products such as smartphones, high-end tablets and DTVs to succeed, OEMs do not just need an SoC. ARM is at the centre of a global network of more than 1,000 silicon and software companies which create a complete solution, from design to manufacture and end use, for products based on the ARM architecture. ARM offers a variety of resources to ecosystem members, including promotional programs, social media and industry networking opportunities that enable ARM Partners to come together to provide end-to-end customer solutions. The ARM Mali ecosystem is still young but growing rapidly, with well over 125 public partners already included. Their areas of business range from Services and Standards through to Computational Photography and Computer Vision.

6. Support at every step of the way – ARM offers a detailed support program to customers in order to help them be successful. For example, the ARM Services Division offers ongoing support, training and documentation to ARM licensees. As another example, the ARM Mali Developer Centre offers a wealth of tools, drivers and SDKs for developers who are working with ARM Mali GPUs in order to help them get the highest performance possible out of their applications.

7. A GPU for every occasion– ARM currently offers eleven separate graphics processor licenses and one video processor. Each of these can be scaled from one to a maximum of sixteen cores with the ARM Mali-T760. This offers 72 different GPU implementation choices, and that’s even before the generational advancements to shader cores, memory systems and software drivers are taken into account, or the semiconductor companies’ customizations of the GPUs post-licensing. This broad IP range enables semiconductor companies and OEMs to offer a diverse array of differentiated end products, all from the one GPU architecture.

What are your thoughts on the subject? Let us know in the comments below.

[1]“Qualcomm Single Largest Proprietary GPU Supplier, Imagination Technologies the Leader in GPU IP, ARM and Vivante Growing Rapidly, According to Latest Report From Jon Peddie Research” http://jonpeddie.com/press-releases/details/qualcomm-single-largest-proprietary-gpu-supplier-imagination-technologies-t