14 DAY TRIAL // ARM, the company that is behind the processor architecture used in many of today's smartphones and tablets, has recently stated that in 18 months it expects its Mali graphics core to match the power of the current Sony Playstation 3 and Microsoft Xbox 360 gaming consoles.
This claim was made by the British company in an interview with The Inquirer, which was published a short while ago.
ARM hasn't provided any information about how it plans to achieve this feat, but the 18-month schedule is based on the its current development cycle, which requires 1.5 to two years to release a substantially new architecture.
The yet-unnamed graphics core will follow on the footsteps of ARM's Mali T604 GPU that has already begun sampling.
This is the first ARM designed chip to feature GPGPU capabilities as well as support for OpenCL, and will open new possibilities for the firm and for the developers that code for this chip.
Even though ARM will manage to deliver on its promises with its next-generation Mali chips, the main question that still remains is how Nvidia will respond to these threats.
The Santa Clara company has a vast experience in the graphics space and in the second half of this year will deliver the quad-core Kal-El chip that could just as well bring almost console-level performance to tablets and other portables.
Furthermore, in 2012, Nvidia will release the Wayne SoC, which comes in two different flavors, the fastest of which includes an eight-core ARM-based processor and 32 to 64 GPU cores that are DirectX 11+ compliant and also support OpenGL 4.x and OpenCL 1.x as well as PhysX.
All in all, even if ARM is able to deliver on its promise with the Mali core, the real question is how well its GPU will fare against a stronger than ever competition, which is spearheaded by Nvidia.