Chinese Version 中文版： 联发科技借助 Mali™-T720 扩展移动市场份额
We’ve all come to expect our portable gadgets to wow us with their smooth, 3D, feature-rich displays and their ability to support fast-action, console-quality games. But I wonder how many people stop to think about the innovation and technology that underpins those stunning user experiences.
Here at ARM we’re all about innovation – it’s what we do! The resulting technologies are then licensed to the world’s leading semiconductor companies who make the chips for all those exciting products that we have come to love. One of ARM’s leading technology brands is Mali – and ARM® Mali™ GPUs are at the heart of a wide range of successful consumer devices – providing that ‘wow factor’ we talked about at the beginning.
But let’s just step back for a moment and consider how the ‘innovate, develop, implement’ cycle can be sustained at such a fast pace that each product generation has features even more compelling than the last. The key principle here is to blend the introduction of new technologies and features with the smart reuse of existing hardware and software platforms - in order to leverage the maximum return from every investment and to ensure rapid time to market (TTM).
The scalability of Mali GPUs perfectly aligns with the reuse paradigm; the performance of a design can be tuned by simply varying the number of cores within the GPU. This, combined with reuse of the same driver and software framework, means a wide range of products - from entry-level, cost-sensitive designs through to those that are high-end and feature-rich - can quickly be brought to market.
One of ARM’s SoC partners is MediaTek, a company based in Taiwan. MediaTek always impresses me with the speed at which it innovates and brings product to market. I’m pleased to say that MediaTek is a partner for Mali GPU technology across its product range. A pair of recent announcements highlight how MediaTek has used the scalability of Mali GPUs and ARM Cortex® processors to good effect. In October last year, MediaTek announced details of their MT6735, an SoC for the mainstream that uses a four-core Cortex-A53 processor and a Mali-T720 MP2 GPU. In the past few days MediaTek has followed this with the announcement of the MT6753. This latest SoC is aimed at high-end applications and uses an eight-core Cortex-A53 processor combined with a Mali-T720 MP3 GPU.
The use of common processor and GPU types across the product range allows the TTM benefits of scalability to be realized; MediaTek comments, ‘MT6753 is compatible with the previously released MT6735, which can significantly shorten the product development cycle’. According to Mr Hsieh, president of MediaTek, there will also be a variant of the MT6735 to address particular low-end market requirements – the MT6735M.
These news pieces from MediaTek are yet another indication that 2015 is going to be an exciting year for Mali GPUs and Cortex processors.