ARM’s Mali Midgard Architecture Explored
by Ryan Smith on July 3, 2014 11:00 AM ESTA Brief History of Mali
ARM as a CPU designer of course needs no introduction. The vast majority of the world’s smartphones and tablets are powered either by an ARM designed CPU or a CPU based on ARM’s instruction sets. In the world of SoC CPUs, ARM is without a doubt the 800lb gorilla.
However in the world of SoC GPUs, while ARM is a major competitor they are just one of several. In fact from a technology perspective they’re among the newest, having roots that go back over a decade but still not as far as the rest of the major competitors. This is something of a point of pride for ARM’s GPU team, and as we’ll see, results in a GPU design that’s not quite like anything else we’ve seen so far.
Like all good GPU stories, the earliest history of ARM’s GPU division goes back to the late 1990s, where what would become ARM’s GPU division was first created. Originally a research project by Norwegian University of Science and Technology, the core Mali group was spun off to form Falanx Microsystems in 2001. At first Falanx was attempting to break into the PC video card market, a risky venture in the post-3dfx era that saw several other PC GPU manufacturers get shaken out – S3, Rendition, Revolution, and Imagination among them – and ultimately a venture that crashed and burnt as Falanx was unable to raise funding.
During a period of development of which they call their “scrappy phase,” due to their limited resources Falanx pivoted from designing PC GPUs to designing SoC-class GPUs and licensing those designs to SoC integrators, a much easier field to get in to. From this change in direction came the first Mali GPUs, and ultimately Falanx’s first customers. Among these were Zoran, who used the Mali-55 for their Approach 5C SoC, which in turn ended up in a couple of notable products including LG’s Viewty. But with that said, Falanx never saw great success on their own, never landing the “big fish” that they were hoping for.
LG's Viewty, One of Mali's First Wins
Ultimately as the SoC industry began to heat up from growing cell phone sales, ARM purchased Falanx in 2006. This gave ARM a capable (if previously underutilized) GPU division to create GPUs to go along with their growing CPU business. And from a business perspective the two companies were a solid match for each other as Falanx was already in the business of licensing GPUs, so for Falanx this was largely a continuation of status quo. Though for what was becoming ARM’s GPU division this was just as much of net win as it was for ARM, since it gave the Mali team access to ARM’s engineering resources and validation, capabilities that were harder to come by as a struggling 3rd party GPU designer.
Now as a part of ARM, the Mali team released their first OpenGL ES 2.0 design in 2007, the Mali-200. Mali-200 and its immediate successors Mali-300, Mali-400, and Mali-450, were based on the team’s Utgard architecture. Utgard was a non-unified GPU (discrete pixel and vertex shaders) designed for SoC-class graphics, and over the years received various upgrades to improve performance and scalability, especially on Mali-400 where Mali products first introduced the ability to use multiple cores.
Even to this day Utgard is arguably the Mali team’s most successful GPU architecture, based in large part on the architecture’s no-frills ES 2.0 design and resulting low die space requirements. Along with driving high-end SoCs of the era, including those that have powered devices such as the Samsung Galaxy S II, Utgard remains a popular mid-range GPU to this day, with Mali-450 securing a spot just this week in Samsung’s forthcoming Galaxy S5 Mini.
Mali-450 Lives On In Samsung's Galaxy S5 Mini
Now with a team of nearly 500 people and having shipped 400 million Mali GPUs in 2013 (or as close to “shipping” as an IP licenser can get), the Mali team’s latest architecture and the subject of today’s article is Midgard. Midgard ships as the basis of ARM’s Mali-T600 and Mali-T700 family GPUs, and while it was initially introduced as a high-end architecture, it will be making a transition to cover both the high-end and mid-range through the recent introduction of more space/power/cost optimized designs. After initially replacing Utgard at the high-end last year, this year will see Utgard finally replaced in the mid-range market.
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darkich - Friday, July 4, 2014 - link
You guys are missing the fact that Snapdragon 805 can reach a much higher memory bandwidth than Tegra K1.TheJian - Saturday, July 5, 2014 - link
But it still loses to K1 in most gpu stuff (all?). You're forgetting AMD/NV have had 20yrs of trying to figure out how to get the most they can from bandwidth for gaming. The devs have had that long working with their hardware also (game devs I mean). Everyone else has to play catch up here for years as they've never had to do anything game wise until last year or so as android etc gaming pumped up a bit.That is why you see ZERO Qcom optimized games (or did I miss one?) :) It's easier to optimize for a chip you already know inside out (amd/nv). I even went to Qcom's gaming page just to see if there were any games they had on their list that were REQUIRING snapdragon to see xx effects etc. There were none last I checked. All the games are just on googleplay with no snapdragon mention (like on NV games they say THD, and these games look quite a bit better than the regular versions) as they appear to work on ALL players chips. Google seems to be realizing K1 is where you want to be on gpu's at least for gaming centric stuff/automotive and I'd expect devs to continue to favor NV for optimizations as they don't need to learn a thing about k1 it's KEPLER which they've already spent 2yrs+ playing with (probably longer as they get dev versions long before we get a retail card so games can be made/optimized for them by the time they hit).
At 20nm xbox360/ps3 will be left behind as new games keep getting made on mobile. If you're not on xbox1/ps4 you'll be buying some cheap 20nm console box that has cheap games ($2-20 vs. $60 for xbox1/ps4) and as good or better graphics than last gen xbox360/ps3. GDC 2013 & 2014 surveys show devs are already massively making games for mobile and as 20nm kicks in everyone has K1 power levels or more. These android consoles/tv's etc will have more tricks than those ancient consoles so you should be able to get much better gaming experience on them for $100-200. The games pricing alone is a draw for poor people. With the ports happening right an left now of quality PC/console games and super cheap pricing there is even more reason to run to mobile for poor people who never played them before (half-life2, trine2, Serious Sam3BFE, none sold more than 11mil or so). There are a billion android users and most clearly have played none of this stuff even the console ports like Final Fantasy games, GTA games etc (on or off PC also doesn't matter) haven't been played by more than 10mil or so combined each. Lost of great stuff for poor people to pick up for under $10 in ports until the REAL new games for mobile hit this xmas/next xmas. All of the stuff the dev surveys show they've been working on will hit this year or next, and they are not angry birds games.
przemo_li - Tuesday, July 8, 2014 - link
Alternative view on Google stance:Nvidia is just first vendor that allowed them to show more features than are possible on Apples A7.
(Mobile-only vendors are not interested in full OpenGL...)
TheJian - Sunday, July 6, 2014 - link
If they're worried about lawsuits (odd they'd say that without merit), they must have had their lawyers tell them they'd be sued due to stealing tech that is probably from AMD/NV. DMCA takedowns, completely closing the kimono so to speak shows they are afraid for good reason. It isn't just competitor crap as nobody else is afraid of that it seems. The same tricks are being used by almost everyone to a large degree. So it seems to me they clearly owe someone some money and don't want to pay. They will probably show their details once they remove that stuff from a future gen soc or never I guess if they just can't remove it for some reason :)mczak - Thursday, July 3, 2014 - link
You could add Intel HD graphics (baytrail) though. Also quite interesting architecture-wise imho.btw some small correction wavefront size for amd (gcn) is 64, not 16 (I think this was wrong on older anandtech articles too). The simd size is 16 indeed but the same instruction is executed for 4 clocks always (on 16 different elements of the wavefront each clock).
mczak - Thursday, July 3, 2014 - link
Here's actually an explanation how the wavefront size of 64 works for gcn:http://devgurus.amd.com/thread/168154
Achtung_BG - Thursday, July 3, 2014 - link
My first touch phone is black LG Viewty in 2008 with Mali GPU :) :) :) If you have new article for android extention pack comparison with full Open GL will be very intrasting.Jedibeeftrix - Thursday, July 3, 2014 - link
yes please.i'd like to know:
1. how long until the AEP is rolled back into what will be OpenGL ES 4.0
1.1. whether it represents a subset of an existing OpenGL full-fat version (eg 4.4)
2. how this compares to DX 11.2 feature wise
2.1. whether AEP will be expanded in OpenGL ES 4.0 to make it broadly DX 11.2 compliant
przemo_li - Tuesday, July 8, 2014 - link
1) Never. (Though, separate extensions, can get into ES. AEP is just thin bundle over many other extensions)1.1) Yes. OpenGL 4.x is still capable of running AEP code.
2) DX11.2 is single vendor en-devour currently... (And You really should compare to F(eature)L(evel)11_2).
2.1) WHY?
Why on earth You need all those things?
Industry move in different direction. (Mantle, DX12, Metal, AZDO)
Doing stuff efficiently is new mantra now.
Adding more stuff from DX FL11_2 (Yes if You talk about features You MUST use F(eature)L(evels)!!!), would only complicate things for OpenGL ES.
We need AZDO.
Kevin G - Thursday, July 3, 2014 - link
I can see Qualcomm's concerns about a shader arms race in mobile: it has already happened on the CPU side without much benefit to the consumer. However, with the explosion in screen resolution in tablets, a spec race here would have a more tangible benefit for consumers. It sitll boggles my mind that a retina iPad has 50% more pixels and a slower GPU than my desktop system with a 1080p monitor driven by a GTX 770. My sole concern would be temperatures and power consumption.Well if Qualcomm isn't going to disclose the information, how much can be implied from driver information? Qualcomm purchased the mobile Radeon drivision from AMD back in 2009 and then came up with the anagram Adreno. If they're still using a design based upon what they got form AMD, it'd be reflective in similar drivers. If they've come up with a new architecture, it too would be evident in radically different drivers. The details would be lacking of course but some generalities could be made.