Arm has launched Arm Mobile Studio 2020.1, an update to our studio of developer tools for debugging and optimizing Android games and their rendering workloads. This release includes Mobile Studio Professional Edition, in addition to the freely available Starter Edition, a new edition that enables automated Android application performance analysis for Arm CPUs and Mali GPUs as part of continuous integration (CI) workflows.
Arm Mobile Studio Professional users can integrate data from the toolsuite into an existing CI workflow to deploy large-scale automated performance testing across multiple devices. Use Streamline and Performance Advisor to automatically capture key application performance metrics. These can include application frame rate, CPU load, and GPU load, as well as detailed metrics about the workload running on the Mali GPU. The easy-to-read performance reports generated by Performance Advisor provide an ideal means to monitor performance during development, and to identify starting points for more detailed optimization investigations.
The Professional Edition also lets users build bespoke data dashboards from the data that been collected. Performance Advisor's machine-readable JSON reports can be imported into any JSON-compatible database and visualization platform, such as the ELK stack. Compare metrics between test runs to quickly determine which changes impacted performance, and which type of workload is the likely cause for a regression. Query the data and compare performance against specific targets to identify optimization next steps.
Arm Mali GPUs implement a comprehensive range of performance counters, that enable users to closely monitor GPU activity as an application runs. The charts in Arm Streamline visualize this performance counter activity, helping with the identification of bottlenecks and workload inefficiencies that cause poor GPU performance. To make this analysis easier, we have published detailed descriptions of all the performance counters available for the Mali Bifrost and Valhall architecture families.
Browse the Mali GPU Counter Reference on the Arm Developer website.
The new Mali datasheet can be used to quickly determine the features and capabilities of Mali GPUs users may find their application running on today. It includes Mali-T720, based on the Midgard architecture, through to the latest Mali-G78, based on the Valhall architecture. Information available includes at-a-glance performance specifications for each GPU, including warp width, thread count, cache sizes, and the peak operations per clock cycle available for each of the main data processing pipelines. This information can be used to set performance budgets, and compare the expected performance across device families.
Download the Mali GPU Datasheet from the Arm Developer website.
Performance Advisor now supports captures taken with devices with Mali-G57 and Mali-G77 GPUs, based on the latest Valhall architecture. For arithmetic-heavy shaders this shows users the shader performance down by the different arithmetic pipelines that they are using, enabling clearer targeting of shader optimizations.
A new chart to visualize CPU cycles per frame has also been added, allowing more accurate monitoring of CPU performance changes. Monitor FPS alongside the number of CPU cycles per frame to reveal areas of correlation that might indicate portions of the application that have a CPU load problem.
Our optimization advice pages have been extended to cover a wide range of common performance problems, with tips on how to avoid them.
For a full list of all changes in this release, read the Mobile Studio 2020.1 release notes.
As Arm-based processors are very widespread in the smartphone industry, it is impossible for us to test our tools on all devices available for sale to the public. However, we do test internally with a wide range of Android devices. In this release, we are able to confirm support for the following devices, in addition to the existing devices listed on our supported devices page:
We would love to hear what you think about Arm Mobile Studio, what you would like to see in the future versions, and how we can enhance your development workflow. Please send us your comments and feedback.
Download Arm Mobile Studio 2020.1