ARM's Mali-400 MP4 is the Fastest Smartphone GPU...for Now
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 11, 2011 1:21 PM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Samsung
- Arm
- Android
- Galaxy S II
- Mali 400
- Mobile
Earlier this morning we published our long awaited review of the Samsung Galaxy S 2. In it we dedicated a few pages to investigating Samsung's own Exynos 4210 SoC. The chip a full featured dual-core Cortex A9 design, comparable to TI's OMAP 4. The big news however is the Exynos 4210 is the first SoC in a smartphone to use ARM's Mali-400 GPU.
Samsung implemented a 4-core version of the Mali-400 in the 4210 and its resulting performance is staggering as you can see above. Although it's still not as fast as the PowerVR SGX 543MP2 found in the iPad 2, it's anywhere from 1.7 - 4x faster than anything that's shipping in a smartphone today.
The Mali-400 MP4 is put to good use in the Galaxy S 2 as our own Brian Klug found it to be the smoothest experience by an order of magnitude compared to any currently available Android phone.
The downsides to the Mali-400 MP4? It doesn't have the best triangle throughput, which could be an issue in future games that may scale along that vector rather than simply increasing pixel shader complexity.
Source: AnandTech - Samsung Galaxy S 2 Review
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Stormkroe - Sunday, September 11, 2011 - link
Why is the Sensation missing form gl2.1 benches? Also, no where in the vellamo chart does the sgs2 get anywhere close to 100% faster than the evo 3d. I'm a huge adreno fan, and feel that it performs WAY better than most people give it credit for, usually due to it's higher resolution in tests that can't be ran off screen.sprockkets - Sunday, September 11, 2011 - link
You need to read the article; they no longer have the phone to test with it.ab303 - Sunday, September 11, 2011 - link
Earlier version of glbechmark has the following result for IPAD-2 offscreen test @ 1280x720Egypt offscreen: 38
PRO offscreen: 55
the new version from this report indicates 85/148.
I suspect that the new version result on IPAD-2 is for 800x480 resolution and not 1280x720.Could be a bug in iOS port of the new GLbenchmark version... result is very suspicious considering it is almost 3X higher than previous version number.
iwodo - Monday, September 12, 2011 - link
May be worth Anand to look at it?ab303 - Tuesday, September 13, 2011 - link
IPAD-2 results @ 1280x720 offscreen with vsync should be as below:Egypt ~ 50
PRO ~ 102
which is still better than galaxy S2. most likely latest glbenchmark has bug in iOS port... watch out new release.
ab303 - Tuesday, September 13, 2011 - link
sorry meant with vsync OFFGnillGnoll - Wednesday, September 14, 2011 - link
Versions of GLBenchmark before 2.1.0 don't even have the offscreen test.ab303 - Friday, October 7, 2011 - link
yes, it did have. what they had was an offscreen 720p test (but still with vsync on).Egypt was ~ 38FPS for 720p offscreen with vsync on, on the IPAD-2
The next version of glbenchmark removes the vsync on, and the result now shoots up to 85.7! this is too good to be true. For people familiar with opengl, onscreen tests require eglswap() to be called, for offscreen test if you remove the eglswap() and do glflush instead, you can get the FPS without vsync limitation.
But there is no guarantee that the underlying drivers and h/w do the same work as onscreen test. For e.g. a smart driver can figure out that it gets a bunch of render buffer commands routed to offscreen FBOs, but the result is not even used (no pixel read calls or texture loads from these FBOs), and so can skip the rendering.
Unless you have tools to extract frames out of the GPU, you can never be sure if the results of these offscreen tests make sense or not.
So, i dont think it is right to assume that IPAD-2 GPU is much better than Mali400MP just by looking at one data point from glbenchmark.
Josemarti - Tuesday, September 13, 2011 - link
I'm wondering Why do not include the Motorola Atrix in your investigation.Specially now when Google had bought Motorola. No matter what, I think Atrix must be a reference in this stuff, because Google is owner of Android and Motorola.
I think you are in time to include it.
PS: Sorry my bad English.
randombytes - Thursday, November 10, 2011 - link
Was release in Oct, but it is using same A5 chip as of iPad2.