Set to dominate?
The Mali GPU family comes in three main flavours. Here's a diagram from ARM's explanation of Mali detailing the main features of each.
"ARM brought its first Mali GPUs to market in 2006 and combined this with an integrated graphics software stack, expanding its capabilities and broadening its total solution offerings for licensees," said Jon Peddie of Jon Peddie Research.
"This has posed serious competition to other GPU IP suppliers and with ongoing product investment and Partner collaboration, ARM is primed to lead the next era of mobile gaming - an important task, considering that the quality, complexity and variety of games available for the broadening range of handheld devices is set to soar in the next couple of years."
That's praise indeed coming from one of the world's foremost graphic market experts. Mali licensees already include Samsung, LG and Motorola. ARM reckons there are already 80 million phones using Mali in the marketplace, including the LG Renoir, which uses a Mali-55 GPU and an ARM CPU.
It will be interesting to see what, if anything, NVIDIA does with this technology. It already licenses ARM IP for its Tegra processor, but if NVIDIA hopes to dominate the market for graphics in convergent devices, as implied by the amount of noise it's making about its Ion GPU, it will almost certainly have to compete with other Mali licensees.
