ARM shone at CES this year and there have already been some fantastic pieces of coverage on our community about it - check out Latest ARM powered tech at CES 2014 with Samsung Galaxy Note Pro 12.2 and Galaxy Tab Pro 12.2, the Snakebyte Vyper gaming experience, and Jigabot AIMe auto-tracking camera mount, All the best bits of CES2014 with ZTE Nubia 5S, Pine Smartwatch, Parrot Sumo, Audi S3, and NVIDIA Tegra K1 or Final day of CES2014 with Sphero, ARM CEO Simon Segars, Makerbot Replicator 2 3D Printer, and Anki Drive smart toy car racing for more details. However, if you were looking for some more graphics highlights from CES, look no further than here!
Firstly, at the start of January, hype had started to build around the VP9 and HEVC demos that would be on display across a variety of booths on the show floor. In addition to their VP9 decoder (see Ittiam and ARM are the first to efficiently bring Google’s VP9 to mobile devices), Ittiam Systems have done a fantastic job in developing an HEVC decoder which, as shown in the demo above, is optimized for ARM and runs off the Samsung Exynos Dual SoC at 1080p 30fps whilst only using a minimal fraction of the processing resource available. Extrapolations from this demo suggest that the Samsung Exynos Dual Core processor is more than capable of running 4K content at an efficient level using this decoder - watch this space for more details!
Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression (ASTC) has been talked about a lot in these blogs - give it a quick search if you need to find out more - but it is only in the past couple of months that it has become available on shipping devices (the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 with an ARM® Mali™-T628 GPU was the first out). This next demo, an adaptation of the well-received SeeMore demo, is the first time that ASTC will have been seen in public. To start with, the demo compares the energy consumption of uncompressed, ETC2 and ASTC textures. Let us know in the comments below if you can see a decline in image quality from ETC2 compression when the more efficient ASTC is applied - we bet you can't!
Because as you can see in the second half of the video, the "Difference Map" highlights the visual artifacts which the texture compression produces. What do you think? Will you consider using ASTC in your next project?
Do you need a processor with GPU Compute to render 4K graphics? As this next demo shows, no. The six-core ARM Mali-450 GPU (600MHz) and quad-core ARM Cortex®-A9 CPU (2GHz) in the AMlogic A8726-M8 SoC have enough processing power to deliver high quality, smooth 4K gaming and user interfaces (courtesy in this demo of Autodesk Scaleform).
But GPU Compute is extremely useful when it comes to next generation computer vision and gesture recognition, as this next demo shows. eyeSight Technologies have perfected their gesture recognition algorithms. Their solution is fast, smooth, responsive and intuitive even at lower light levels. It works by using OpenCL™ to harness the extra computational capacity of the GPU so that complicated, parallel workloads can be performed more efficiently and at higher frame rates. This demo not only shows how the solution works, but also compares its performance when implemented on the CPU or the GPU. Although it is being shown here as a DTV/home entertainment use case, it is more than suitable for other situations, for example in the automotive industry.
Got any questions about the demos above? Feel free to ask us a question in the comments below - we'd be happy to help out!