The SIGGRAPH exhibition floor is currently buzzing with activity as staff from all companies ready themselves for the grand opening tomorrow morning. All the ARM staff in attendance are smoothing out the final creases on the booth and making sure that everything will be perfect when attendees hit the showfloor tomorrow morning at 9:30am. Unfortunately, I can't quite leak a photo of the booth at this point in time, but I can show you a picture of an awesome statue outside the Vancouver Convention Center as a loosely related teaser:
"Digital Orca" Statue outside the Vancouver Convention Center
So what does the ARM Booth have to offer this year? Besides the opportunity to win a Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 each day, here are a couple more reasons to visit Booth #933:
Firstly, we have a number of fantastic demos from partners which are the results of many months collaboration with ARM. More information will be released very soon concerning the latest GPU technology in the Rockchip-based devices on display and also concerning the hardware accelerated web rendering solution on show at the Samsung Research pod - check back in on the ARM Mali Graphics blog tomorrow (Updated: Rockchip Rock the Boat) if you're curious (or of course, if you're at SIGGRAPH, pop by the booth and take a look yourself!). Besides the demo from the Research department at Samsung, Samsung LSI will also be on the ARM booth demonstrating the great capabilities of the latest devices powered by the ARM® Mali™-T628 GPU-based Exynos 5 Octa processor, including the Odroid-XU3 development board.
Also joining us are Collabora, who are showing how next-generation open source graphics technologies will provide power efficiency and great multimedia performance simultaneously. Their demonstration exemplifies the latest developments in the GStreamer media framework, the Wayland window system, and the Linux kernel, benchmarking power/CPU/GPU utilization and frame-time accuracy between the new Wayland and legacy X11 window systems. The Collabora demo makes use of the full breadth of ARM Mali GPUs and many features of the Samsung Exynos 5 Octa platform, including its powerful media decoding engine and display controller. In addition, Simplygon are showcasing their automatic 3D game content optimization solution, PlayCanvas will show their cloud-hosted and real-time collaborative HTML5 & WebGL game engine which gives developers all they need to create stunning 3D games in your browser or on mobile devices, including some amazing tools, and Geomerics will be showcasing the Transporter demo, the latest and greatest demonstration of Enlighten technology which was recently integrated into Unity to provide dynamic global illumination.
On the ARM side, we have a number of demos coming to you for the very first time. Firstly, following the announcement of the Juno board last month, attendees will be able to see 64-bit content running on a quad-core ARM Cortex®-A53 CPU and dual-core Cortex-A57 in ARM big.LITTLE™ configuration. With this solution available in the market, developers will be able to more easily delivery the next generation of content for Android OS-based devices.
Secondly, we have a brand new demo showcasing the benefits of the Pixel Local Storage extension to the OpenGL® ES 3.0 API which promotes a new method of achieving bandwidth efficiency. The most significant difference between mobile GPUs and their desktop equivalents is the limited availability of sustained memory bandwidth. With advances in bandwidth expected to be incremental for many years, mobile graphics must be tailored to work efficiently in a bandwidth-scarce environment. This is true at all levels of the hardware-software stack. This demo shows that deferred rendering could be made bandwidth efficient by exploiting the on-chip memory used to store tile framebuffer contents in many tile-based GPUs. ARM is giving an unmissable talk for those interested in this subject this Wednesday at 10:45am in Rooms 109-111.
Some more familiar demos will also be on show, highlighting the benefits of ASTC Full Profile, the OpenGL ES 3.1 feature Compute Shaders and the unique tools ARM offers. For more information on these demos, check out Daniele Di Donato's blog Inside the Demo: GPU Particle Systems with ASTC 3D textures, Sylwester Bala's blog Get started with compute shaders or Lorenzo Dal Col's writings on Mali GPU Tools: A Case Study, Part 1 — Profiling Epic Citadel.
If you're at the show, we look forward to seeing you soon! Otherwise, keep an eye on our social media channels throughout the week for regular updates on ARM's activities at SIGGRAPH.