ARM has announced a suite of new media IP, which can be used to develop media SoCs for smartphone and tablet products. The suite is comprised of the Mali-V550 video accelerator (supporting HEVC), the Mali-DP550 display processor and the Mali-T800 GPU family (including the Mali-T820, Mali-T830 and Mali-T860 GPUs).
Power savings across the line are enabled by the ARM Frame Buffer Compression (AFBC) technology; AFBC is said to reduce power and bandwidth cost of transferring image data by up to 50%. Other Mali technologies, such as Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression (ASTC), Transaction Elimination and Smart Composition, are also used. A new feature is also built into the V550 and DP550: Motion Search Elimination, designed to lower bandwidth use by up to 35%.
Each of the new Mali GPU IP cores supports APIs including OpenGL ES 3.1, DirectX 11.1, OpenCL and RenderScript. They also feature lossless compression with AFBC and Smart Composition for input bandwidth reduction. The T820 is designed for entry-level products; the T830 for mid-range products; and the T860 for high-end products. The T820 and T830 offer up to four shader cores, scaling to 16 shader cores in the T860.
ARM says that the V550 is the IP industry’s first single-core video encode and decode solution for HEVC. It can show 1920 x 1080 content at 60fps on a single core or up to UltraHD at 120fps on eight cores. Simultaneous encode/decode is also supported.
The DP550 can be used to offload tasks such as composition, scaling, rotation and post-processing from the GPU.
ARM’s new Mali media IP suite can be licensed now; devices are expected to be launched in late 2015 and early 2016.
