ARM Plotting Eight-core Mali GPU for Mobile Devices

CAMBRIDGE, UK – Popular chip designer ARM is plotting a brand new line-up of GPUs capable of containing up to 8 cores in one chipset.

The GPUs are codenamed T624, T628 and T678 and will be added to the expected by the end of the year, with the Mali 450 for mid-range handsets,  the quad-core T604 and the eight-core T658 for top-end devices. The T678 will be aimed at tablets specifically.

Currently the latest ARM GPU is the quad-core Mali 400 (present on the Samsung Galaxy S III) which is already scoring very well on the benchmark fields.

The new chipsets are expected to have 50 percent better performance with the same silicon area and power draw, with the explicit aim of delivering “console-class gaming,” 4K and even 8K video workloads, as well as impressive 60fps user interfaces in phones, tablets and smart TVs.

The most interesting feature in the new architecture is the Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression (ASTC) codec added to the hardware of the chip. This is an attempt from ARM to stop the “fragmentation of standards” that game and app developers have to deal with when programming software for ARM based devices.