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Launching Mali-T658: "Hi Five-Eight, welcome to the party!"

Edvard Sørgård
1 minute read time.

Just a day ago we've lifted the veil off the ARM® Mali™-T658, the second Mali GPU based on the Midgard architecture that we launched a year ago. It's been brewing in our labs next to the Mali-T604 and already has key leading licensees, but until now hasn't enjoyed the public presence of its sibling. Now they are both ready to power the leading end-user devices of 2012! Yes you hear right - expect to see them both in stores next year.

So how does the Mali-T658 complement the Mali-T604? By showing off some of the versatility of the Midgard architecture it brings in a compute punch of up to 350 GFLOPS and over 5GPixel/s real fill rate to external memory to power high-end mobile devices with Visual Computing and Augmented Reality, the 4k DTV revolution, and Exascale High Performance Compute. It's another fantastic component in the joined-up computing story from ARM.

You can still find every part of the unrivalled feature set of the Mali-T604 in the Mali-T658, including the true multicore capability allowing partners to choose the number of cores to implement making one product release from ARM equal a whole roadmap of products from others.

I must say I'm proud that our team has been able to develop and deliver these masterpieces; their rigorous focus on our vision and quality and execution has put Mali in an enviable position ahead in time, quality, reputation and performance. You make my dreams come true!

If you can't make it to one of our upcoming Technical Symposia events, join us online to find out more about our latest and greatest Mali GPU.  We'll be holding a webinar entitled "Harnessing the power and flexibility of the Mali Midgard architecture"& on 15 November, at 10am PST and you can register here. 

Anonymous
  • Thanks Edvard,

    The OpenGL/OpenCL interop answers my question quite well. Thank you!

    The IEEE paper, is behind a paywall, so at the moment it is off limits for an enthusiast like myself. Suffice it to say that I find the idea of hierarchical binning quite fascinating. Does this improve hidden surface removal in a scene? What would a developer be required to do (eg. sort primitives front to back) to best take advantage of this?
  • Hi Sean,
    This should hopefully answer your questions.

    Using the OpenGL/OpenCL inter-operation extensions on a system that has the CoreLink CCI-400 interconnect will be the most efficient way of combining compute with graphics on these platforms. The interconnect will make sure that there is a coherent view of the shared data between the Cortex CPU and the Mali GPU whether it is in the caches or not, and the API extensions allow our common driver to do non-copy sharing of the buffers.

    One of our key tile based redering innovation which Mali-T604 and Mali-T658 implement is hierarchical binning. Of course I think it's great, but you don't have to take my word for it. There's a non-solicited [url="http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/CSE.2009.386"]IEEE paper[/url] on the technology I can recommend; for more information please see my previous [url="http://blogs.arm.com/multimedia/272-we-love-academia-thanks-for-the-citing-%E2%80%93-arm-mali-graphics/"]blog entry[/url] on this subject.
  • Great news and good work. If ARM builds a desktop processor I will buy it. I am fed up with the tyranny of Intel and AMD and Nvidia . I WILL buy an ARm desktop/laptop processor for a change. Keep up the good job.
  • I really am grateful for all of the help given. Truly.

    My second question comes from a video that Jem Davies posted when talking about the T604. He mentioned that the T604 had the state-of-the-art memory bandwidth reduction and featured a slide that indicated an optimized tile-based renderer. How does the T604/T658 improve upon tile based optimizations of the 400?

    The video is at youtube.com/watch?v=O7fM6yBC084
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