ARM Announces New Eight-Core Mali-T658 GPU

ARM has announced its latest graphics processing unit (GPU), the Mali T-658, designed for super smartphones and tablet computers.

The Mali-T658 allows up to eight cores to be connected, ensuring that it is ten times faster than its predecessor.ARM claims that this increase in power will allow mobile devices to run faster games, more complex software and produce graphics similar to a Sony Playstation 3. The chip has been designed for smartphones and tablets, but is also intended for use in smart TVs and automotive entertainment systems.

ARM Strength

The T658 will also allow processes outside the traditional realm of graphics processing such as image processing, voice recognition and augmented reality.

ARM hopes that the chip will expand its share in a growing market and allow it to challenge competitors Intel, Nvidia, Imagination Technologies and Qualcomm.

“You have cinema, you have high definition, you have hugely complex CGI movies on HD screens in your lounge,” said Ian Smythe, director of marketing at ARM’s Media Processing division. “You expect this high quality experience from every screen that you look at. And so the user experience has to be of that sort of quality.

“Reproducing a CGI movie – which is generated on a server farm where it takes a day to render a frame with 50,000 processors – being able to reproduce that in a mobile experience is clearly a challenge,” he continued.

Although Samsung Galaxy 2 handsets currently use ARM’s Mali-400 MP, demand for ARM’s GPUs has traditionally been lower than that for its CPUs, which currently dominate the smartphone and tablet market.

ARM hopes to seize control of the mobile PC market within four years and recently announced its first 64-bit architecture, ARMv8, in an attempt to challenge Intel and AMD in the PC market, with demand likely to increase when Microsoft’s Windows 8 operating system is launched.