The Mali-450, which is offered as synthesizable RTL, is intended for use in entry-level and mid-range smartphones. The core, codenamed Tyr, has a common software platform with Mali-400 and provides market-leading OpenGL ES2.0 performance.
Steve Steele, senior product manager in the media processing division, said that the Mali-450 was not simply a doubling of the multicore scalability of the Mali-400. He said that tweaks had been done to the internal graphics engines "You would get better performance from the Mali-450 but it occupies slightly more area," he said.
ARM's recommendation is that for lower graphics burdens the Mali-400 with one to four cores is used while for higher performance the Mali-450 with five to eight cores is used.
There are close links between the GPU and Cortex-based CPUs playing to ARM's strength and allowing minimum transistor count in the interface, thereby further saving energy and easing time to market.
ARM reveals the Mali-450 graphics chip
Posted on Tuesday, June 12 2012 @ 16:49 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck