The Mali-G71 GPU is ARM’s latest and most powerful processor product. This GPU is based on the new Bifrost architecture, boasting exceptional mobile graphics processing capabilities. In today’s fiercely competitive mobile GPU market, the outstanding performance of the Mali-G71 positions it at the forefront of the industry, elevating mobile GPUs to new heights.

The Mali-G71 was developed with future high-end mobile phones in mind, addressing the demands for Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), and 3D gaming. It supports advanced APIs such as Vulkan and OpenCL 2.0. Over the past few years, the performance of mobile GPUs has improved significantly, and the demands of games on hardware have increased. The Mali-G71 aims to elevate mobile graphics processors to a new level, ensuring that they deliver more powerful graphics processing performance than any previous devices, compensating for the historical shortcomings of mobile devices in graphics processing capabilities. The new Mali-G71 GPU’s graphics processing capabilities even reach the level of some mid-range laptops.

Bifrost Architecture

The new Mali Bifrost architecture incorporates numerous innovations and new technologies, representing the future of mobile graphics processors. This architecture utilizes Claused Shaders technology, redesigning execution units to allow temporary computation results to bypass registers, reducing storage pressure on the register file, which significantly lowers power consumption. At the same time, simplifying the control logic of execution units effectively reduces core area.

Another innovation of Bifrost is the Quad based vectorization technology, which allows four threads to be executed together, sharing control logic, thereby increasing the utilization of execution units and achieving nearly 100% utilization.

Scalability

The previous generation of mobile graphics processors could reach up to 16 cores. To meet the growing graphics performance demands of mobile devices, the new Mali-G71 offers scalable capabilities from 1 to 32 cores, doubling the number of GPU cores compared to the previous generation, providing superior graphics processing capabilities. This series can be applied in smartphones, digital TV devices, and high-end VR devices. The new GPU combination is highly flexible, with a 40% improvement in transistor performance per unit area, allowing our partners to freely configure based on product performance needs, achieving a perfect balance between performance, power consumption, and cost, targeting their products precisely at their desired market.

High-End Gaming

Mobile gaming has rapidly developed over the past two years, with mobile game players becoming ubiquitous. The consumption growth of the mobile gaming market in 2017 is expected to exceed the total consumption of mobile games in the United States in 2016, reaching $40 billion. In recent years, the performance requirements for mobile games have significantly increased. If application/game developers can improve the speed at which applications adapt to hardware, then a 32-core GPU can quickly become an essential configuration for high-end mobile devices. The energy efficiency of the Mali-G71 has improved by 20% compared to the Mali-T880, allowing it to maintain longer high-frequency operation times and better stability within limited thermal capabilities.

APIs: Vulkan and OpenCL 2.0

Improvements in APIs are something we have always prioritized, as the quality of APIs determines how developers interact with underlying hardware. As a company that produces both GPUs and CPUs, we need to meet the needs of developers, which is a key factor in determining whether users can achieve the best experience. In recent years, we have worked hard to allow developers to access the underlying hardware, leading to the emergence of the new API interface Vulkan 1.0. Similarly, OpenCL 2.0 was developed with high expectations, being more friendly to heterogeneous computing developers. We hope that the new API interface can inspire developers to use some highly innovative methods. The Mali-G71 not only supports Vulkan 1.0 and OpenCL 2.0 interfaces but also supports shared virtual memory and Fine Grained buffers, enhancing the consistency of the experience through comprehensive hardware upgrades, while the improvements in APIs can greatly simplify software development.

Virtual Reality (VR)

VR is currently the most popular project, and all manufacturers are considering how to provide users with the best VR experience. The Mali-G71 was born to face this challenge. The extremely high performance requirements of VR mean that the GPU in high-end mobile devices needs to deliver more powerful and efficient performance than ever before. At the same time, other components of mobile devices, such as cameras and screen resolutions, are continuously improving, achieving higher execution efficiency, which helps reduce the thermal power consumption of components. Therefore, the GPU has more idle performance available for applications that require significant graphics computation, minimizing power consumption.

Content Protection

As we spend more time on our phones, many people no longer need a home computer or laptop, as we can now handle all necessary content on our phones, including downloading, viewing documents, and sharing them with other devices. The newly released Mali-DP650 display processor is capable of processing 4K video, and the Mali-G71 allows seamless transmission of this high-quality content to your television without loss of image quality. This means we can watch 4K videos without affecting the normal use of our phones, ensuring we do not miss any beautiful moments.

The Mali-G71 has been designed and optimized as part of a complete system, using CCI-550 to provide better support for CPU and GPU systems, optimizing the consistency of heterogeneous computing. The Mali-G71 has minimized design power to improve graphics processor performance within the same core area. The first devices using the Mali-G71 are expected to be launched in early 2017, bringing mobile graphics processing and mobile gaming to a new level.