ARM announces faster Mali 8 GPU designs

ARM has announced three new GPUs: the Mali-T820, Mali-T830 and Mali-T860. The fastest variant, the T860, is up to 45 percent faster than the current Mali-T628 GPUs, according to the chip designer. ARM also comes with the V550 video decoder and DP550 display processor.

The Mali-T860 offers sixteen shaders with two aluminum units each. The GPU, which can be clocked up to 695MHz, can handle 10bit Yuv color space and, in addition to OpenGL ES 1.1, 2.0 and 3.1, also supports OpenCL 1.1 and 1.2, as well as DirectX 11.1. According to ARM, the Mali-T860 is up to 45 percent faster than its predecessor.

The Mali-T830 can be found in the middle segment. This GPU runs at 650MHz and has four shaders with two aluminum units each. The graphics processor can optionally also handle 10bit Yuv color depth. Compared to the T860, ARM offers additional DirectX 11 support at feature level 9_3.

For the lower end of the market, ARM offers the Mali-T820. It also runs at 650MHz and also offers four shaders, but with only one aluminum unit per shader. According to ARM there is no support for DirectX 11.1, but for DirectX 11 feature level 9_3.

The three new GPU types, all based on a 28nm design, can be easily combined with Cortex A7, Cortex A15 and Cortex A17 socs, according to ARM, while the more modern Cortex A53 and Cortex A57 designs with the new generation of Mali GPUs. ARM expects manufacturers to start using the first T8x0 GPUs from the middle of next year.

In addition to the three new Mali GPUs, ARM is announcing the Mali-V550, a video decoder capable of h265 encoding and decoding on a single core. In an eight-core configuration, the V550 would be able to encode or decode 4k video at 120fps. There is also the DP550 display processor from ARM. This chip design is highly energy-efficient in image processing jobs, such as post-processing functions or rotating images, according to ARM. This design is also suitable for UHD video material.