Bringing Mali, the Android GPU of Choice, to Wearables

Edvard Sørgård

ARM Tech Symposia China 2015

Senior Principal Graphics Architect / ARM

November 2015

© ARM 2015 2

ARM Mali GPU success

Total

114

licenses 73 licensees

25 new Mali

licenses

in FY14

Mali is in

75% of DTVs…

…

>50% of Android™

tablets…

…

>35% of smartphones

0

100

200

300

400

500

600

2011 2012 2013 2014

Mill

ion u

nits

550M Mali–based GPUs

shipped in 2014

© ARM 2015 3

Mali™ graphics in low-power mobile today

Smartphone Wearable Mali-400 GPU

Mali-450 GPU

Mali-T720 GPU

Mali-T820 GPU

Mali-T830 GPU

Mali-T760 GPU

Mali-T860 GPU

Mali-T880 GPU

Entry-level

High-end

OpenGL® ES 2.0

OpenGL ES 3.1

OpenGL ES 3.2 *

Vulkan TM **

Mid-range

High-end

Mali-400

GPU MP1

Mali-400

GPU MP2

OpenGL ES 2.0

* Products are based on a published Khronos specification and are expected to pass the Khronos Conformance Process when available. Current conformance status can be found at www.khronos.org/conformance.

** Products are expected to support Vulkan once finalized. Current specification status can be found at www.khronos.org/vulkan.

© ARM 2015 4

Why OpenGL ES 2.0? Every pixel matters!

Dissecting a modern user interface

Programmable

shaders allow

control of every

pixel

Animated icons

Blended text and

icons with

wallpaper

Wallpaper may be

live/animated

Arbitrary

scaling,

translations,

rotations of any

object

Controlled by

multi-touch

gestures

3D widgets

convey

information at a

glance and

provide

intuitive control

functions

© ARM 2015 5

Why OpenGL ES 2.0? Energy-efficiency

OpenGL ES 2.0 provides a balance of per pixel control and energy-

efficiency

OpenGL ES 2.0 is used within the Android™, Android Wear and

Tizen™ operating systems

For rich user interfaces, mapping, casual gaming, etc., OpenGL ES 2.0 is the de-facto

standard and is mandatory for many operating systems

Other versions of OpenGL ES have introduced a number of additional features to

support immersive video games, but the OpenGL ES 2.0 feature level is most efficient

for user interfaces

© ARM 2015 6

Wearable requirements (1)

Battery life

1 week minimum between charges

Small form factor

Display size typically 1.5 to 1.7 inch diagonal

Aesthetically pleasing, much more visible than a phone

This also limits battery size

© ARM 2015 7

Wearable requirements (2)

Includes ambient or rest modes of operation due to long periods with

no conscious user interaction

Implies low-leakage and/or power-gated hardware

Graphics are simpler, using less geometry than Smartphones

Display size too small for complex 3D games

320x320 (300 PPI) today, but growing

© ARM 2015 8

Wearable requirements (3)

30FPS or higher in interactive modes

Maintaining the slick user interface (UI) experience expected from Smartphones

Orders of magnitude less in ambient or rest modes

Up to three full screen layers

© ARM 2015 9

Mali-470: Halving the power consumption

The Mali-470 GPU halves the power

consumption of graphics processing

when compared to Mali-400

Supports OpenGL® ES 2.0 and 1.1

with leading area-efficiency

Updated implementation of the

Mali-400 series graphics processor

architecture called Utgard that

powers more than a billion devices

© ARM 2015 10

Mali-470 development teams (1)

Mali-470 was developed as a close collaboration of ARM Norway’s

hardware designers and ARM Shanghai’s driver developers

The original designers of the Mali-400 GPU and Mali-450 GPU have

helped architect many of the Mali GPUs that followed

They used the experience and technology gained from these

developments in the design of Mali-470

© ARM 2015 11

Mali-470 development teams (2)

A key objective was to keep driver changes to a minimum

A driver stack that has shipped in over a billion devices has a high level

of stability and optimisation that we were keen to retain

An extensive range of real-world applications were used throughout the

design process to tune the energy-efficiency of the Mali-470 graphics

processor

Verification process placed emphasis on user interfaces

© ARM 2015 12

Mali-470 GPU design changes

Quad-thread scheduling optimizations

Frequency of control and state updates

significantly reduced

Centralizing per-quad state to reduce state

clocking through pipe

Microarchitectural optimizations

Pipeline improvements make aggressive use of

clock-gating, including clock-gating L1 caches

Bypassing functional blocks whenever not

required to progress instruction execution

Datapath optimizations

Targeted use of fixed point arithmetic

Updated in Mali-470

Updated in Mali-450

Interfaces compatible with Mali-400

© ARM 2015 13

Continued innovation on the Mali-470 GPU

Energy-efficiency (FPS/mW) increases

2x vs Mali-400

Supports the latest version of

Android™, Android Wear and other

Linux kernel –based operating

systems

Up to 4 pixel processors can be

implemented

Multi-core design supports screen resolutions

from 640x640 to 1080p at 60FPS 32bpp

Norm

alis

ed E

nerg

y-effic

iency

(FPS/

mW

)

Mali-400

1.0

2.0

1.3

Mali-450 Mali-470

© ARM 2015 14

Summary

With Mali-470 we have a significant update to the Utgard GPU

Architecture that is an excellent fit for Wearables

The Mali-470 graphics processor halves the power consumption

Expanding the smartphone experience into a wider range of devices

Thank You

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Copyright © 2015 ARM Limited