Arm has created a new architecture, Komeda, to integrate its Mali-D71, CoreLink MMU-600 and Assertive Display 5 technology (acquired by Arm with the purchase of Apical last year). Assertive Display 5 technology is intended to assist in optimising display performance both to allow for different ambient light conditions and to perform tone mapping for HDR (HLG & HDR10).
The changes are designed to help with VR and AR applications as well as supporting multi-window operations, allowing Android environments to be more like desktop operations.
Arm said in a blog post that the Mali-D71 reduces GPU workloads by performing composition, rotation, high-quality scaling, and other imaging processing in fixed function hardware at the end of the graphics pipeline. It can support secondary displays, or can re-use the secondary display resources to process more full-frame layers. It can also sustain up to 4x the delay on the system bus for the same throughput, compared to previous generation Mali-DP650, thanks to optimisations in the memory subsystem. Arm said that this is significant for high performance display processing where 4K frames must be fed to the output at up to 120 fps. The display processor needs to optimise the time it has on the system bus by prefetching pixels in the microseconds when the display is blank so that its buffers are always full of content.
