ARM on Monday introduced the new Mali-T800 series of graphics-chip designs aimed at the low- and mid-tier mobile markets. The company also announced the the Mali-V550 video accelerator and the Mali-DP550 display controller. A system-level approach to media IP enables power savings through system-wide adoption of bandwidth saving technologies such as ARM Frame Buffer Compression (AFBC). Other technologies proven in prior Mali GPUs such as Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression (ASTC), Transaction Elimination and Smart Composition are now utilized across all Mali media IP blocks for even greater energy savings.

The Mali-V550 and Mali-DP550 processors also benefit from new features such as Motion Search Elimination technology that reduces bandwidth by up to 35 percent.

The ARM Mali-T800 GPU family includes the Mali-T820, Mali-T830 and Mali-T860 GPUs.

The Mali-T820 GPU is optimized for entry-level products, achieving up to 40 percent more performance density compared to the Mali-T622 GPU.

With native hardware features such as 10-bit YUV support, the Mali-T820 is an accompaniment to the Mali-DP550 and Mali-V550 in addressing the requirements of the 4K DTV and STB market. Native 10-bit YUV support enables high fidelity 4K display without the need to perform intermediate conversions in software, thus ensuring the multimedia system delivers quality high resolutions at lower bandwidth levels.

The Mali-T830 GPU strikes a balance of performance and efficiency, delivering up to 55 percent more performance than the Mali-T622 GPU. Thanks to its additional arithmetic pipeline, the Mali-T830 is able to compute arithmetically complex content faster than the Mali-T820.

The Mali-T860 GPU is providing high performance and 45 percent more energy-efficiency compared to the Mali-T628 GPU.

The Mali-T800 GPU family supports the latest APIs including OpenGL; ES 3.1, DirectX 11, OpenCL; and RenderScript and includes features such as lossless compression with AFBC and Smart Composition for input bandwidth reduction. The Mali-T820 and Mali-T830 offer up to four shader cores, scaling to 16 shader cores in the Mali-T860.

The Mali-V550 integrates the latest standards, including 8 and 10-bit HEVC decode and 8-bit HEVC encode. Meanwhile it is combining encode and decode functionality on each core and maximizing re-use across all codecs.

On top of support for AFBC, the Mali-V550 introduces a new bandwidth saving technology known as Motion Search Elimination. Motion Search Elimination builds on the concept Transaction Elimination introduced in Mali GPUs and is able to lower memory bandwidth by up to 35% as well as lower latency for WiFi display use cases, ensuring the battery lives of devices.

Similar to the Mali-V500, the Mali-V550 is scalable from a single core capable of 1080p/60fps to 4K120. Equally it includes support for TrustZone Media Protection as standard, ensuring that users are able to view high quality protected content on any Mali-V550 based device.

The Mali-DP550 enhances the capabilities of the Mali-DP500, offering a wide range of post-processing features such as rotation, scaling and image enhancement, support for resolutions up to 4K2K, energy saving technologies such as AFBC and secure technologies such as ARM TrustZone. On top of this, the Mali-DP550 adds support for the composition of up to seven layers and its co-processor interface enables third party IP to be included in the display pipeline. In addition, it supports energy saving features, such as Motion Search Elimination.

The Mali-DP550 comes with the intelligent Mali Display DDK. The Mali Display DDK utilizes architectural features in Mali GPU and Video IP, such as AFBC and Motion Search Elimination, and makes smart decisions about when and how to offload tasks from the GPU in order to maximize the battery life of the device.