Samsung Galaxy S3: Mali-T604 - First look at ARM's next-gen GPU ~ Samsung Galaxy S3 Blog

ARM had introduced two new graphics cores last year in November, one of them is the Mali-T604. We want to take a look at this one closer, since the T604 become the biggest potential candidate for Samsung's Galaxy S3.

The other core ARM Mali-T658 should bring theoretically up to 10x more graphics power over his younger brother the Mali -400 which has the Samsung Galaxy S2 build in. Unfortunately, he comes in 2013.

One cannot accuse the Samsung Galaxy S2 of owning a bad graphics performance:

Samsung Galaxy S2 benchmark

The Mali-400-GPU is still leading on smartphones, however, it is going to be overtaken soon by Nvidia's Tegra 3. ARM does not sleep of course and introduced the technology which will be in the coming tablets and smartphones which will still hopefully appear this year. The Mali-T658 will allow – attention, advertisement – to play games on console level.

Before the T658 the T604 core comes in the second half of the year, hopefully first in Samsung's Galaxy S3.
The Mali-T604 GPU is the forerunner for ARM's the new architecture which will enter then also in the T658. The highlight of the GPU becomes, how in the desktop area long ago commonly, clearly more efficient Unified Shader. The arithmetic power of a quad-core configuration of the T604 with a clock up to 1,8Ghz should be 68 GFLOPS. For comparison Mali-400 in the Galaxy S2 reaches about 10 GFLOPS. This should accelerate even the most complex and demanding software applications from android market.

He will also support a wide number of APIs, such as DirectX 11 OpenCL, OpenVG, OpenGL ES 2.0 and RenderScript.

Mali-T658 GPU presentation sheet

Features	Value	Description
Anti-Aliasing	4xFSAA 16xFSAA	4x Full Scene Anti-Aliasing (FSAA) with minimal performance drop
API Support	OpenGL® ES 1.1, 2.0 OpenVG™ 1.1 OpenCL™ 1.1 DirectX® 11 Renderscript™	Full support for next-generation and legacy 2D/3D graphics applications
Bus Interface	AMBA®4 ACE-LITE	Compatible with a wide range of bus interconnect and peripheral IP
L2 Cache	Configurable 32KB-256KB	32KB recommended per core
Memory System	Virtual Memory	Built-in Memory Management Unit (MMU) to support virtual memory
Multi-Core Scaling	1 to 4 cores	A single IP covering a range of mid to high-end product requirements and price/performance points

"The Job Manager within Mali-T600 Series GPUs offloads task management from the CPU to the GPU and enables seamless load balancing across active shader cores. Through ARM coherency and interconnect technology, compute tasks can conveniently span the CPU and GPU as well as other available compute resources, accessing data more efficiently during shared processing in a heterogeneous system."

In the end we would like to show you the strange advertising video, with the ARM promotes his new chips. Have fun.