During the ARM Developers Conference we sat down with Michael Dimelow, ARM's Graphics Director of Marketing, and Borgar Ljosland, its Manager for Graphics Business Development.

They were both very excited about the Mali GPU which can go from the world’s smallest GPU to the highest performance GPU IP at over one billion pixels per second, that means 1080p graphics on smartphones and game consoles. Ljosland said that the silicon is coupled with a complete stack of middleware and drivers as well as supported by a graphics ecosystem that harnesses the reach and power of the ARM Connected Community.

Dimelow explained that by 2012 there will be a one billion unit market for high-resolution graphics in the mobile device world. He said that ARM does their benchmarks differently. The put their benchmarks together with real OEM use cases, not marketing numbers. The results are Mali-400 MP @ 220 MHz which will display HD 720p. So, an OEM can scale their ARM Mali IP from mobile phones to fanless tethered designs.

Ljosland said that the Mali product line is scalable to 1 GHz and can display over one billion pixels per second. He showed us an example with his own mobile phone. Later Dimelow showed a roadmap of the Mali product line.

Then their conversation turned to Intel moving into the MID marketplace with the Atom processor. Ljosland said the thing to watch is the real world power consumption for any device. ARM's complete latest ARM CortexTM-A8 processor is the first applications processor based on the ARMv7 architecture and is the highest performance, most power-efficient processor available from ARM. With the ability to scale in speed from 600MHz to greater than 1GHz, the Cortex-A8 processor can meet the requirements for power-optimized mobile devices needing operation in less than 300mW (milliwatt is equal to one thousandth of a watt). 

Ljosland and Dimelow talked over each other in their enthusiasm to hit the high points of a total ARM CPU with Mali GPU. They spoke of the integrated L2 cache on Mali-400 MP and how memory efficient it was because of using tile based, deferred rendering which minimizes the buffer size on the chip. They were both quite enthusiastic about the upcoming 32 nanometer SOC, ARM GPU and Mali CPU, that will consume less than 3 watts.

Later in the day we met Dr. Jon Peddie, of Peddie Research , who said that with acquisition of Falanx Mali IP core two years ago, ARM expanded their capabilities and broadened their one-stop shopping offerings to their licensees. The graphics engine ARM acquired, the Mali 55, already had powerful GPU capabilities and was the smallest die in the industry.

Peddie said further that the ARM product line has been expanded to include the Mali 200 with OpenGL ES 1.1 support. At the ARM conference, ARM demonstrated the latest member of the family, the multi-core OpneGL ES 2.0 GPU. This new GPU has amazing performance, still a small Si footprint, and supports all 2D and 3D JAVA API, FlashLite and Falsh10, and all Khronos open APIs.

We really appreciated Jon Peddie taking the time to pass along his insights about ARM's Mali graphics. Peddie's ending comment really caught our attention. He said that the other GPU IP suppliers like ATI, Imagination Technology, and Vivante now have some serious completion.

There is more to come in our next installment about the ARM Developers Conference 2008. X