ARM Mali-V500 Overview

The ARM® Mali™-V500 offers advanced video technology combined with power-efficiency and one of the smallest chip sizes in the market to creators of mass-market mobile devices. Designed to scale from 1080p60 on a single core to 4k120 on the full eight cores, all Mali-V500 variations will offer stunning HD visual and experiential quality to end users. The ARM Mali-V500 is the initial offering in the innovative Mali Video roadmap and offers multi-standard codec support.

Why Mali-V500?

Building on the strong momentum and expertise of ARM Mali’s graphics solutions, the Mali-V500 offers a scalable, secure solution to the video processor
market capable of 4k resolution at 120fps on eight cores; thanks to this “trick-play,” video edit and slow motion capture in HD is consequently possible. Even with a single core, the Mali-V500 is capable of bringing 1080p60 performance to mass-market smartphones, accordingly meeting growing consumer expectations and changing video consumption patterns. The design is capable of managing multiple, simultaneous encode and decode HD streams and through this can support multi-party video conferencing and advanced user interfacing.

The Mali-V500 incorporates a novel lossless frame compression technique, ARM Frame Buffer Compression (AFBC). By coupling AFBC in the Mali-V500 with AFBC in either the display controller or Mali GPU a bandwidth saving of over 50% is achievable. This delivers a considerable system-wide power reduction, potentially allowing the use of lower cost DRR memory.

At all times ARM takes a system-wide approach to security starting with the deepest levels of hardware and software. In accordance with these values, the Mali-V500 was architected with support for TrustZone® enabling hardware-backed content security from download to display.  As high value movie and TV content is consumed across a wider range of devices, creators and distributors of this content are looking for greater protection of their investments and all ARM video solutions will meet these demands.

For use cases such as gaming on Wi-Fi display it is important to users that latency from mobile device to display is as low as possible, at least <100ms in order to maintain an engaging experience. The Mali-V500 boasts latency of <10ms at 1080p30 for both encode and decode making gaming on Wi-Fi display a compelling experience.

Whether we are talking about graphics or video processing, visual quality is extremely important and Mali-V500 includes high bus latency tolerance whereby video processing can continue for over 5000 cycles without external memory access. This feature ensures that consumers will not see jerky playback due to dropped frames when other processes are happening on the device.

Specifications