Products Overview

To reach the image quality necessary for today’s cutting edge mobile gaming experience, clear communicative in-car infotainment experience and provide scalability to reach console performance levels within the constraints of an embedded system you have to think a little different. ARM provides that in the shape of the Mali™ range of IP cores with its advanced architecture for graphics acceleration, specifically tuned for embedded system environments. Offering features such as 4x and 16x full scene anti-aliasing (FSAA) through out the range and advanced shader language support in the latest cores.

ARM is currently offering two products in the Mali family, Mali55 and Mali200 with MaliGP2.

• Mali 200 with GP2 - Full OpenGL ES v2.0, v1.1 and OpenVG v1.0 Support:
  This product targets next generation mobile gaming and multimedia experience, with class lead OpenGL ES 2.0 shader execution performance and the ability to bring console quality gaming to mobile applications. Capable of rendering advanced shaders on VGA and higher resolutions at over 30 frames / s in a low memory footprint.
• Mali 55 - Full OpenGL ES v1.1 and OpenVG v1.0 Support:
  Mali55 brings graphics acceleration into the mass market. ARM has the lowest cost fully compliant OpenGL ES and OpenVG accelerator in the industry. At around 1.4mm2 on 90nm Mali55 offers in excess of 30 frames / s QVGA high performance OpenGL ES v1.1, JSR184 games as well as enabling a greatly enhanced user interface experiences via OpenVG support all in one core. The benefits of combining OpenVG and OpenGL ES v1.1 functionality in the same core solution are lowered cost for ARM silicon partners. The Mali55 is a perfect companion for ARM9 and ARM11 CPUs, and performs well in a standard AHB2.0 environment.

Mali Common Features

Most important features of the current Mali family members are:

• 3D Graphics
  4X / 16X FSAA
  Flat / Gouraud Shading
  Perspective Correct Texturing
  Point Sampling / Bilinear / Trilinear Filtering
  Mipmapping
  Multi Texturing
  Dot3 Bump Mapping
  Alpha Blending
  Stencil Buffering (4-bit)
  JSR184
  Point Sprites
  2 bit per texel Texture Compression (FLXTC)
  4 bit per texel Texture Compression (ETC)
  
• 2D Graphics
  Lines, Squares, Triangles, Points
  Vector Graphics
  ROP3/4
  Arbitrary Rotation / Scaling
  Alpha Blending
  Multitexture BitBLT

Key Benefits

High Image Quality
For highest possible image quality the Mali family of IP cores offer 4X and 16X full scene anti-aliasing. This is made possible by Mali’s unique rendering sub-system together with smart design and graphics algorithms which reduce bandwidth, but do not compromise performance.

High Performance
The Mali family of IP cores delivers performance targeted at different applications and market segment. The cores are designed to sustain high frame rates for complex scenes in high memory latency environments. Tests run on 3DMarkMobile06 and other complex applications shows that the Mali IP Cores deliver market leading performance with very high image quality utilizing minimal memory bandwidth.

Extended Battery Life
Having great graphics in a product does not have to mean compromised battery life. The main power consumer in a graphics system is accesses to external memory. The minimal bandwidth usage of the Mali Graphics Solutions, together with a smart design with several power saving techniques and a modest gate count ensures overall low power consumption.

Scalability
To meet present and future market demands for scalability of performance, the Mali architecture is designed bottom up for upward and downward scalability of performance and features.

Total Solution
To get the most power efficient and complete hardware / software solutions possible, ARM™ develops and optimizes API drivers, device drivers and other software in-house. All cores in the Mali-family are designed to be compliant with relevant industry standard APIs and System-on.Chip interfaces.

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