The chip designer promises a 50 percent performance increase over the preceding products. However, what makes the new Malis especially interesting is the integration of ARM's Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression (ASTC) texture compression technique as well as support for OpenCL 1.1 Full Profile.
According to ARM, the speed increase is due to increased frequency of the register transfer level (RTL) as well architectural changes to "execute" graphics more efficiently. ARM is offering the Mali 600 design as the T624, which scales from one to four cores, the T628 with one to eight cores. there is also the 8-core T678 flagship with additional ALU support that deliver four times the GPU performance of the T624.
ARM said that its ASTC "significantly optimizes GPU performance and increases battery life in devices" while delivering "higher quality [graphics] than most other formats currently in use." Besides OpenCL, the architecture also supports OpenGL ES 1.1, OpenGL ES 2.0, OpenGL ES 3.0, DirectX 11 FL 9_3, DirectX 11, and Google Renderscript.
ARM is targeting the new processors at smartphones, tablets and smart-TVs.
