Mali (processor)

The Mali and Immortalis series of graphics processing units (GPUs) and multimedia processors are semiconductor intellectual property cores produced by Arm Holdings for licensing in various ASIC designs by Arm partners.

Mali GPUs were developed by Falanx Microsystems A/S, which was a spin-off of a research project from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

[3] On June 28, 2022, Arm announced their Immortalis series of GPUs with hardware-based Ray Tracing support.

[38][39][40] New microarchitectural features include:[41] Like other embedded IP cores for 3D rendering acceleration, the Mali GPU does not include display controllers driving monitors, in contrast to common desktop video cards.

[64][65] Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression (ASTC) is supported by Mali-T620, T720/T760, T820/T830/T860/T880[66] and Mali-G series.

As with all ARM products, the Mali video processor is a semiconductor intellectual property core licensed to third parties for inclusion in their chips.

An interface to ARM's TrustZone technology is also built-in to enable digital rights management of copyrighted material.

[119] The V500 is a multicore design, sporting 1–8 cores, with support for H.264 and a protected video path using ARM TrustZone.

Released with the Mali-T800 GPU, ARM V550 video processors added both encode and decode HEVC support, 10-bit color depth, and technologies to further reduced power consumption.

[126] The processor is intended to support 4K (including HDR) video on mainstream devices.

[146][147][148] On January 3, 2019 the Mali-C52 and C32 were announced, aimed at everyday devices including drones, smart home assistants and security, and internet protocol (IP) camera.

[149] On September 29, 2020 the Mali-C71AE image signal processor was introduced, alongside the Cortex-A78AE CPU and Mali-G78AE GPU.

[152][153] It is the smallest and most configurable image signal processor from Arm, and support up to 8 camera with a max resolution of 48 megapixel each.

Arm claims improved tone mapping and spatial noise reduction compared to the C52.

[155] The reverse-engineering project was presented at FOSDEM, February 4, 2012,[156][157] followed by the opening of a website[158] demonstrating some renders.

On February 2, 2013, Verhaegen demonstrated Quake III Arena in timedemo mode, running on top of the Lima driver.

[162] Panfrost is a reverse-engineered driver effort for Mali Txxx (Midgard) and Gxx (Bifrost) GPUs.