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Imagination Technologies unimpressed by ARM graphics move

by Scott Bicheno on 16 November 2010, 18:25

Tags: ARM, Imagination Technologies (LON:IMG)

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Holy Mali

We had previously spoken to ARM about its Mali announcement, but we wanted to get the Imagination perspective too. For further balance we didn't recount any of the comments we got from talking to Steve Steele - head of product management, media processing - at ARM, when we interviewed King-Smith.

The Mali T604, like the Cortex A15 CPU design ARM is keen to associate it with, is still several years away from appearing in any SoCs. Accordingly ARM is restricted to talking about its potential and the presentation we were given to accompany our interview was entitled "The architecture for visual computing".

"The significant thing about this GPU is that it has both a visual and a GPGPU element to it," said Steele. "It can equally well handle input data, such as video decoding." There was arcane talk of a tri-pipe architecture and tile-based rendering, but it wasn't long before Steele moved onto other reasons why chip-makers might be tempted by the Mali T604 design.

"Typically we find people want to combine Mali GPUs with ARM CPUs," said Steele. "This is the first GPU in a family - people buy into a roadmap. There are some very cool things coming up - things that you would never have imagined you could do with a handheld device."

We have no way of assessing the competing claims of Imagination and ARM graphics cores now, let alone future generation ones. But we do find King-Smith's point about experience, track-record and install-base convincing. If future ARM Mali partners find they lack graphics driver support, or fail to convince developers to code for their chips, there will be only so many demands ARM can make of their relationship.

 

 



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