ARM Introduces the Mali-T860 Mobile GPU Configurable Graphics IP
ARM have a new GPU out!
The Mali-T860 is a scalable design based on their Midgard architecture which can be configured with from one to sixteen cores. Note that with Midgard, these “cores” are a far heavier-weight unit than the “shader cores” mentioned in comparisons of desktop GPUS where the term is often applied to what could more accurately be described as an ALU or a SIMD lane and given a value in the thousands. With Midgard a “core” is more like an NVIDIA SMX in terms of the level of design abstraction.
The bump this design claims to offer over the previous generation comes down to energy efficiency. 45% improvement over Mali-T628 is advertised, although whether ARM have rolled an expectation of implementation on a smaller process into this figure is unknown (YMMV). It may also benefit overall system performance by offering a cleaner integration with other ARM IP blocks introduced simultaneously, through native 10-bit YUV support.
More analysis is out there:
