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ARM Mali-400 Overview

Ellie Stone
Ellie Stone
August 6, 2013
3 minute read time.

The world's first OpenGL® ES 2.0 conformant multi-core GPU provides 2D and 3D acceleration with performance scalable up to 1080p resolutions, while maintaining ARM® leadership on power and bandwidth efficiency.


Why Mali-400 MP?

OCT12-Mali-400-large_image.jpg

With support for 2D vector graphics through OpenVG™ 1.1 and 3D graphics through OpenGL ES 1.1 and 2.0, the Mali™-400 MP provides a complete graphics acceleration platform, based on open standards.

Scalable from 1 to 4 cores the Mali-400 MP enables a wide range of different use cases, from mobile user interfaces up to smartphones, tablets and DTVs, to be addressed with a single IP. One single driver stack for all multi-core configurations simplifies application porting, system integration and maintenance. Multicore scheduling and performance scaling is fully handled within the graphics system, with no special considerations required from the application developer

The provision of an industry standard AMBA® AXI interface makes integration of Mali-400 MP into system-on-chip designs straight-forward, and also provides a
well-defined interface for connecting to other bus architectures. ARM is in the unique position to provide an optimized compute platform that uses ARM Cortex™ processors, Mali GPU and ARM CoreLink™ CCI-400 technologies. This heterogeneous approach means that a range of applications is more efficiently processed when shared between the CPU and the GPU. This makes full use of the inherent capabilities of each system component to achieve the best possible balance of power and performance.

Mali-400 MP has a fully programmable architecture providing high-performance support for both shader-based and fixed-function graphics APIs. It provides class leading anti-aliasing capabilities ensuring optimal image quality, with virtually no performance overhead. A wide range of third party applications, middleware and tools support through the ARM Mali ecosystem program. These are pre-validated with other ARM hardware and software products, as well as a wide array of third party applications and content.

          

FeaturesBenefits
Advanced tile-based deferred rendering and local buffering of intermediate pixel statesReduced memory bandwidth overhead and lower power consumption
Efficient alpha blending of multiple layers in hardwareUnlimited number of blended layers without additional bandwidth consumption or unexpected performance drops
Full Scene Anti-Aliasing (FSAA) using rotated grid multi samplingSignificantly higher quality and performance than alternative oversampling methods
Integrated MMU based on standard ARM MMUAllows virtualization of GPU memory resources and fine-grained memory protection
Fully autonomous GPUEnables maximum parallelization of CPU and GPU tasks
Independent CPU and GPU power managementMaximize battery life, minimize heat dissipation
Fully optimized production quality software driversMaximum efficiency with low memory fragmentation, reduced integration time and cost, reduced support burden

Performance

Mali-400 MP1

  

FeatureValueDescription
Frequency

210MHz

500MHz

in 40nm LP

in 28nm HPM

Throughput

23Mtri/s, 210Mpix/s

55Mtri/s, 500Mpix/s

in 40nm LP

in 28nm HPM

Mali-400 MP4

FeatureValueDescription
Frequency

210MHz

500MHz

in 40nm LP

in 28nm HPM

Throughput

23Mtri/s, 840Mpix/s

55Mtri/s, 2.0Gpix/s

in 40nm LP

in 28nm HPM

Specifications

            

FeatureValueDescription
Anti-Aliasing

4xAA

16xAA

4x Multi-Sampling with virtually no performance drop

16xAA outperforming all implementations of comparable quality

API SupportOpenGL ES 1.1/2.0Full support for next-generation and legacy 2D/3D graphics applications
Bus InterfaceAMBA® AXICompatible with a wide range of bus interconnect and peripheral IP
L2 Cache8KB - 256KBConfigurable L2 cache optimized for graphics data traffic
Memory SystemMMUMemory Management Unit
Multi-Core Scaling1 to 4 coresA single IP covering a wide range of markets and price/performance points
Anonymous
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