With the recent launch of two new products at ARM® TechCon™ 2013, one High-end product (the ARM Mali™-T760 GPU) and one Mid-range product (the ARM Mali-T720 GPU), ARM further extended its lead as the preferred GPU IP supplier for the mobile industry. Over the past month we have received a significant level of positive feedback from the industry concerning these two new products and our decision to further enhance our GPU roadmaps
ARM separated its GPU roadmap into two parts for a reason. One size does not fit all. One product cannot possibly be best at everything. With our ARM Mali GPUs, our partners are creating devices targeted at a variety of end-users in a tremendous diversity of markets. Yet DTVs, set-top boxes, watches, mobile phones, tablets and so on and so forth all have slightly different requirements. While ARM Mali GPUs are all highly scalable - making them easy to adapt to the market of choice - accessing the different price points within all of those different markets requires some wider thought.
The general rule of thumb is that, for the High-end roadmap, performance is the key. This goes for the GPU as well as the CPU. And it is all about performance within a constrained power and thermal budget. Even though DTVs are plugged into the wall socket, they still have to dissipate the heat from the SoC – and as we all know, DTVs are getting amazingly thin. The same story goes for mobile, watches and tablets. In the High-end it is all about performance; and consumers want performance without limitations. Following the latest standards and features is of the essence here – the highest performance points require hardware that supports the latest APIs. GPU Compute is one example where the performance, as felt by the user, improves when having compute support in the GPU. The same can be said for OpenGL® ES 3.0. It is these added features that not only make the visuals feel better but also pushes the performance envelope within the limited power and thermal budget. The ARM Mali-T760 GPU pushes the performance envelope further than any previous ARM Mali GPU – and at the same time adds support for new features never before seen in mobile.
As for the Mid-range roadmap, the markets this roadmap addresses are all about cost. The cheaper the products then the more people can afford to buy - or upgrade to one. The consumer wants to buy a product that can handle the latest content with a reasonable level of performance. The product shouldn’t just be able to barely open the latest game; it should be able to give a good user experience with a certain quality of look and feel. So what does 'cost' equate to in this part of the roadmap as seen from an IP suppliers view? Or to phrase the question a bit differently; how can ARM help to keep the device cost down? Seen from the end-users perspective the cost of the device is the sum of its hardware components, software components, marketing costs, distribution costs and profit margin. The profit margin of the OEMs is not in ARM’s direct control. Neither are the distributions costs. But the other three: hardware costs, software costs and marketing costs are all things ARM can help to minimise. How? Let me go through each of them in detail.
Hardware
When someone is assembling, for example, a mobile phone, the major cost drivers are the System on Chip (SoC) and the battery. The SoC cost is proportional to the die area of the Integrated Circuit (IC). Having a smaller GPU (in terms of mm2) helps to reduce cost, so ARM works to ensure that each GPU is as area efficient as possible. The bandwidth required for the GPU to render given content is another cost driver; could one reduce the number of external memory pins by having a more bandwidth efficient GPU? If that is the case, the cost could be reduced further without impacting the performance. That’s why ARM is working hard in order to increase the bandwidth efficiency of each GPU. And then there is the power budget. It is not surprising that a smaller battery cost less, but, in addition, having the SoC emitting less thermal energy will also reduce the requirements for the chassis of the device, making the choice of materials and design much wider. And with a wider choice comes further cost savings.
Software
Hardware is nothing without software. All hardware from ARM is designed with software in mind. This is reflected in our GPU software strategy. Using the same basic architecture (the Midgard architecture) across multiple products lowers the software development cost, and with it the price end users have to pay. But the GPU by itself can only do so much without the rest of the system. The GPU needs something to hand work to it, and this is where the CPU comes in. The various ARM Cortex® CPUs are great pieces of hardware. In order for a given task to be run as efficiently as possible the CPU has to interact with the GPU as well as possible. Some of this interaction happens purely through hardware (as is the case with I/O Coherency), whilst most of the interaction happens in a software layer. Building drivers for the complex GPUs that runs on the CPU is not an easy task, and in order to make it as effective as possible knowledge of not only the CPU, but also the GPU is of the essence. ARM leverages its system wide expertise to keep software costs down by sharing its knowledge across the different system components, such as the CPU and the GPU.
Marketing cost – benefits of the ARM Ecosystem
Ever heard of the ARM Ecosystem? The ARM Ecosystem is all about our partners coming together to leverage their strengths. One could argue that the marketing cost of a phone, is not within ARM’s influence. But I would say that ARM is saving costs of a device by enabling partners to leverage close connections with other partners when launching products. The ARM partnership is not only for Silicon vendors, it is for the various OEMs, software vendors, game publishing companies, foundries and so on. If someone is going to launch a ground breaking product, why wouldn’t he leverage the ARM partnership? The marketing message can be much stronger and cost could at the same time be minimized. And of course ARM wants its partners to be successful when launching new products.
Looking at the Mid-range roadmap with its newly launched ARM Mali-T720 GPU and the more mature ARM Mali-450 GPU, you can clearly see all of the above factors play key roles in these products. Both are created to suit their respective markets with a clear emphasis on cost. Whilst the ARM Mali-450 GPU supports OpenGL ES 1.1 and 2.0, the ARM Mali-T720 GPU supports OpenGL ES 1.1, 2.0, 3.0 and the Compute APIs Renderscript/Filterscript– important when looking forward in the mobile space.
Another thing that is clear is that the two roadmap sections, one High-end and one Mid-range, are not mutually exclusive. While the high-end has a clear focus on performance and the mid-range focuses on cost, this does not mean products from each of the two parts do not inherit properties from each other.
If you have any questions regarding our GPU products and our GPU roadmap please post them below!