Everyone wants the best of both worlds. We don’t want to pay a fortune for a phone, but we do still expect it to do everything we need it to. Whether that’s taking crystal clear pictures to share on social media, or supporting high-end 3D gaming, it imposes additional strain on power and efficiency. The demands we place on the mainstream mobile these days mean chip manufacturers have to make some very smart decisions with their next generation offerings.
ARM partner MediaTek recently launched their latest offering to the mainstream mobile segment with the Helio P20 mobile processor. Building on the features of the P10, the P20 still demands the highest performance and provides a premium experience to the user, whilst maintaining superior power consumption and cost efficiency.
The choice to incorporate an ARM Mali-T880 GPU supports the goals of providing a premium performing mobile device without the price tag in a number of ways. The critical characteristic of a high-end mobile GPU is the ability to deliver the extra computational performance needed without draining the battery or exceeding the thermal budget of the device. The Mali-T880 is cleverly designed to deliver the best performance with the lowest energy consumption. It incorporates numerous microarchitecture optimizations as well as bandwidth reduction technologies such as ARM Frame Buffer Compression (AFBC), Smart Composition and Transaction Elimination.
The scalability of the Mali family of GPUs is one of its key features and the ability to choose single or multiple cores is one of the reasons MediaTek selected it for both the P20 and the X20, which is designed for high performing systems. This flexibility reduces the amount of input required to incorporate it into a chipset, thereby significantly reducing the time it takes to get a product to market. MediaTek took full advantage of these benefits in including the Mali-T880 in the Helio P20 processor and continue to select ARM Mali as their GPU of choice for mass market and premium mobile.