ARM announces Mali-T658 GPU

ARM announced today Mali-T658 Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) for the next generation of smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices with desktop-class graphics. Mali-T658 is built on Midgard architecture, which uses three different pipelines within shader cores: arithmetic, load/store and texturing. This allows the GPU to handle graphics, along with arithmetic tasks. Previous Midgard-based ARM GPU, Mali-T604, was announced in November of last year, and had 4 shader cores. Compared to Mali-T604, the newly announced GPU packs twice as many cores (up to 8), and doubles the number of arithmetic pipelines. As a result, the new graphics unit offers significantly better performance than previous generations of ARM graphics products. According to ARM, Mali-T658 has up to 10 times better graphics performance, than Mali-400 MP GPU, and 4 times higher GPU compute performance than Mali-T604.

Mali-T658 supports several different programming interfaces, including Google Renderscript, Khronos OpenGL ES, Khronos OpenCL, Microsoft DirectX 11 and DirectCompute, and OpenVG. The GPU is compatible with Cortex-A15 and Cortex-A7 MPCores, as well as with recently announced ARMv8 architecture. Mali-T658 can be also used in big.LITTLE processing mode, where its ability to offload graphics processing from the CPU should improve overall energy-efficiency.

The first devices with Mali-T658 GPU are expected in 2013.