Arm Mali G78 GPU and G68 GPU Introduction
With the help of CPU Big Brother and its rapid evolution, the ARM Mali series GPU graphics cores have come to dominate the mobile space, beating the old rival PowerVR with little temper. Now, ARM brings back the new flagship-class Mali G78 GPU, the sub-flagship class Mali G68 GPU!
Arm Mali G78 Key Features
- Support for up to 24 cores
- Asynchronous Top Level
- Tiler improvements
- Improved fragment dependency tracking.
Last year’s Mali-G77 debuted with a new Valhall graphics architecture that was widely adopted by top-tier SoCs, and this time around the Mali G78 is naturally its upgraded version, most notably supporting up to 24 cores for the first time, up by half from the Mali-G77’s 16.
Arm Cortex A78 And Cortex X1 Comparison – Suggested Reading.
Of course we know that this is all theoretical, the Mali-G77’s current commercial maximum size is only 11 cores, that is, Samsung Exynos 990, and MediaTek Dimensity 1000 series uses only 9.
ARM claims that the Arm Mali G78 GPU can deliver up to 25 percent performance improvement over the Mali-G77, up to 15 percent even under the same process conditions, with a 10 percent improvement in energy efficiency and 15 percent improvement in machine learning performance, thanks to comprehensive architecture, process and other improvements.
In addition to scaling up, the Mali-G78 has also made upgrade improvements in the architecture, but not many, the only thing that the official highlights are the change from a single global clock domain for the entire GPU to a new two-level structure that achieves the separation of the upper-level shared GPU module from the actual shader core frequency, which is an asynchronous clock domain.
In this way, the core of the GPU can work at a different frequency than the rest, fast or slow, thus solving the imbalance between the geometric output and the computation, texture, engine, and also allows the GPU to run on different voltages, thus reducing power consumption and improving energy efficiency, which is also common practice for desktop-level CPUs and GPUs.
Besides, the Mali-G78 completely rewrites the FMA (Fusion Multiply-Add) engine, including a new multiplication architecture, a new addition architecture, and FP32/FP16 floating point, which saves 30% of the power.
The Mali-G68 is the first sub-flagship GPU, clearly positioned in the middle of the Mali-G70 and Mali-G50 series, the architecture and features are the same as the Mali-G78, the only difference is that it can only support a maximum of 6 cores. In other words, configuring 1-6 cores is called Mali-G68, configuring 7-24 cores is called you Mali-G78, it’s that simple.
