Mobile GPUs
Of course, it isn’t only about console quality
3D games and slicker graphics. Improvements in CPU and GPU power will also
change the way we interact with our devices. Stam talks of having “more
processing power to handle more natural language recognition”.
“Right now you have Siri,” he says, “which
is back end processing, and Google Voice, which is back-end processing, but
you’ll be able to do more stuff locally as well as at the back-end. The phone
or the tablet will be that much more intelligent and contextually aware.”
Meanwhile, Imagination’s Harold describes
how PowerVR’s Series6 GPUs could benefit GPU compute. “We measure that
performance in gigaFLOPS, not polygons,” he says. “That’s a measure of the way
GPU compute is changing how people think about GPUs. They’re no longer just for
putting pixels onscreen; with APIs such as OpenCL you can use our GPUs to do
game physics, augmented reality, image enhancement and more.”
PowerVR
Series6 graphics and compute performance overview
ARM’s Bryant concurs that “you can compute
parallel tasks such as image-processing tasks on GPU, again because that’s all
about efficiency, power consumption and throughput.” For Bryant, more high performance,
efficient processing capability on mobile devices, combined with the software
ecosystem and high-performance LTE networks, will change the landscape for
good. “I really think we’re looking at the future of computing being mobile”.
A mobile revolution
For ARM, this is critical. “I think we’re
probably getting to the point, if not at that point, where consumers are
already reaching for their mobile devices first,” says Bryant, “because that’s
the user experience they want.” In ARM’s view, devices with tailored apps that
are always there, always connected and always updating, will win over more
conventional PCs, and wireless connectivity and cloud based services are
changing the shape of computing. “It’s really convergence. I really believe
that we’re living through this experience where you’ll start to do computing on
whatever screen is in front of you.”
Nvidia’s Stam agrees. “We’re going to be in
a space where your mobile device will be your most important device, and will
be able to do 95% of everything you want to do.” Stam makes it clear that the
desktop PC won’t go away, and that Nvidia’s business there is still a major
focus. However, he also talks of a future where “you’ll sit your device down
next to whatever screen or monitor you want to use and it will talk wirelessly
and that’s it. That’s your gaming rig, that’s your system.”
ARM
Announces New Mali Line of GPU for Smartphones
Not everyone sees the future in smartphones
and tablets. An Intel spokesperson noted that the smartphone market offered
Intel “an incredible opportunity”, but added that “Ultrabooks continue to build
momentum” and that “we’re really pleased with the level of innovation and
invention being brought into this category”. Nor should we forget the Intel based
servers running all the back end stuff.
However, this leads us to a twist in the
mobile processor tale. As ARM based processors grow more powerful and better
tuned to sophisticated multicore arrangements, so ARM’s partners are looking to
take them up to the laptop, the desktop and even beyond. A number of companies
are already producing ARM based servers, and the company’s own literature
targets the Cortex-A15 at low-power all in one PCs and net tops.
Nvidia, meanwhile, is hard at work on
Project Denver, its own high-performance, ARM-based CPU/GPU, which it claims
will “provide the heterogeneous computing platform of the future, by combining
a standard architecture with awesome performance and energy efficiency.”
According to Stam, Project Denver “will have the ability to process up and down
the chain, from mobile devices to supercomputers.” He’s reticent on where it
will appear first, but insists “it’s what our customers demand, and what we
think makes sense, because the efficiency of the ARM architecture plays into
that whole performance per watt equation really well, both up and down the
processor spectrum.”
In other words, the future of mobile
processors might turn out to be the future of computing. It’s an arena where
new competitors will battle it out, and where Atom might yet end up being a
more important technology than Core. Whatever the future holds, we’re seeing
advances right now that will transform the devices we use and the way we use
them in our everyday lives.
Next generation superchips
Nvidia Tegra 4
Codenamed Wayne, Nvidia’s next chip will
pair four to eight 28nm ARM Cortex-A15 cores with a new GPU architecture
believed to be based on Kepler. With a unified shader architecture featuring 24
to 64 fully programmable, general purpose GPU cores instead of fixed function
geometry and pixel shaders, it promises to be twice as fast as Tegra 3.
Texas Instruments OMAP 5
IT’s OMAP processors power tablets from the
Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 to the Kindle Fire HD. The OMAP 5 will have two ARM
Cortex-A15 cores for intensive work, two Cortex-M4 companion cores for
background tasks, and a PowerVR SGX544MP2 GPU.
Qualcomm Snapdragon S4
The Snapdragon S4 is already in high-end
smartphones, where its 28nm Qualcomm designed Krait cores outrun the ARM
Cortex-A9 cores in most current SoCs. However, Qualcomm’s Adreno 320 GPU, which
supports the new OpenGL ES 3 standard for more advanced visual effects, will
double the performance of the existing Adreno 225.
Qualcomm
Snapdragon S4 Mobile Processors 1.
ST-Ericsson Nova A9600
With only two ARM Cortex-A15 cores, but
also the first implementation of a PowerVR Series6 “Rogue” GPU, the Nova A9600
is expected to appear in new smartphones from Nokia. Rogue looks set to deliver
up to 20 times the performance of existing Series5 GPUs (as used in Apple’s A5,
A5X and A6 SoCs) at the same power consumption, in dual-core and quad-core
designs. Performance should scale up from 100 gigaFLOPs (the same level as a
2008 GeForce GTX 260) to a dizzying 1 teraFLOP.
Samsung Exynos 5 Dual
Samsung’s upcoming SoC couples two ARM
Cortex-A15 cores to a quad-core ARM Mali-T604 GPU. The Midgard-based T604 has a
unified shader architecture, more memory bandwidth and support for DirectX 11
and OpenGL ES 3, enabling console quality effects such as self-shadowing and
High Dynamic Range lighting, while opening up plenty of potential for high-end
GPU computing. Exynos 5 Dual should open up Retina-beating resolutions on
future Samsung tablets.
