Hey ARM community. I have bought a decent phone with the following graphics processing unit and I am wanting to know whether or not these 2 GPU's are the same or not:
- ARM Mali 450 MP4 and the:
- ARM Mali 450 MP (The word MP does not have a 4 at the end on this line but the line above does).
So I have given you the names of 2 video processors from ARM which I think feature at least 4 (quad cores) or octa (8) core and are clocked at 700MHz each GPU.
So is there a processor difference between the 450 MP and the 450 MP4????
I would like to know how much video memory the ARM Mali 450 MP or MP4 uses. to store its pixels information or images as a buffer or just information for images or does it share video memory from the ram or shared memory instead?
If it shares memory, what is that type of memory called? NOP, IMP or what? Please give me a link on that.
Hello and welcome raghavsood,
MP means Multi Processing.
When you put a 4 after, it means that it has 4 cores. When it doesn't have a number, it still means mutli-core but the number of cores is not given.
Mali-450 MP - ARM Performance tab indicates the differences between the ARM Mali-450 MP4 and ARM Mali-450 MP8 GPUs as an example.
For the additional details, I would advise you to find the name of the system on chip (SoC) being used. Once you have the name, you can search on its datasheet what the implementation is.
ARM Mali technology is only part of that chip, that's why checking with the silicon datasheet is the only/best way to know exactly how the ARM Mali-450 MP GPU has been implemented.
Does that clarify the naming discrepancy to you?
Alban Rampon seems to have answered the MP question, so I'll just answer the technical bits here.
> So I have given you the names of 2 video processors from ARM which I think feature at least 4 (quad cores) or octa (8) core and are clocked at 700MHz each GPU.
The number of cores and the frequency depends on the implementation of the GPU in a specific chip, rather than the GPU design which ARM licenses to its partners. It is possible to have exactly the same RTL design from ARM built for very different performance and power envelopes, depending on target market. A chip targeted at smartphones will typically clock slower, but be more power efficient per operation because of that, than a chip targeting a "wired market" such as HDTV.
If in doubt check the datasheet for the specific parts you are looking at.
> I would like to know how much video memory the ARM Mali 450 MP or MP4 uses to store its pixels information or images as a buffer or just information for images or does it share video memory from the ram or shared memory instead? If it shares memory, what is that type of memory called? NOP, IMP or what? Please give me a link on that.
All of the Mali GPUs support a unified memory architecture - in nearly all cases we use the same system RAM as the CPU. However, this is configurable so a specific vendor may statically allocate a block of RAM for the GPU or use a separate RAM device with different performance properties (unusual though - most devices just use system RAM).
Again, this is not part of the GPU IP which ARM sells, so it depends on the configuration of the platform and operating system BSP, so always worth checking the part datasheet / manual to see how the GPU memroy layout has been configured.
HTH, Pete
So the ARM Mali - 450 MP has got a quad core processor or is it only dual core because it is a MP = meaning (multi processing) which means it is dual core or only 2 cores?
ARM Mali-450 MP does NOT mean 4 cores, does NOT mean 2 cores, nor does it mean 8 cores.
MP means there is more than one core. If you don't have a number then you don't know.
But, if you search for the processor (SoC) information like we advised, you will find exactly what you are looking for.
The phone product description says it uses MediaTek MT6592.