14 DAY TRIAL // ARM is getting ready to introduce GPU computing in our tablets and future smartphones. The famous ARM processor designer has submitted its ARM Mali-T604 graphics processing unit (GPU) for OpenCL 1.1 complete certification.
The certification will be done by the Khronos group, which is an entity founded in January 2000 some famous hardware companies, including 3Dlabs, ATI, Discreet, Evans & Sutherland, Intel, Nvidia, SGI and Sun Microsystems (now Oracle).
The purpose of the group is to create open standard APIs to enable the authoring and playback of rich media on a wide variety of platforms and devices.
You can check out in the pictures what standards the Khronos group is developing and who the current members are.
ARM understands the importance of GPU computing power and has specifically designed the new Midgard architecture for specific GPU compute applications such as native scalar and vector operations for OpenCL's integer and floating point data types (32 and 64-bit).
The Mali-T604 is the first GPU to implement the Midgard architecture and it comes with support for static and dynamic compilation, hardware-accelerated image and sampler data types, fast atomic operations and compliance to IEEE754-2008 precision requirements.
The new GPU reportedly features very advanced technology that makes the memory bandwidth consumption considerably more efficient. The improvement can reach as high as 30% when compared with the current Mali-400MP.
It is very important that such a popular technology, that will eventually ship in tens of millions of tablets around the world, will come with OpenCL 1.1 support and certification.
Many programs that have specific OpenCL optimizations will likely retain the performance advantage once ported to other hardware architectures with OpenCL capabilities.
We complained about the lack of a big enough OpenCL software base in which AMD’s iGPUs and GPUs could flourish and manifest their performance, but now, if only a fraction of programmers port their ideas to x86, it will be many times more than what we have now.
Don’t get your hopes up, as these are two different domains, but OpenCL popularity in general will greatly increase the chances that we’ll see more x86 software with OpenCL support too.
The OpenCL 1.1 is not the latest version of the standard, as the OpenCL 1.2 version was announced back in November 2011, but ARM is the first GPU designer to submit conformance for full profile OpenCL certification.
Moving parts for the FPU work to the GPU will also increase the battery life of mobile devices along with performance.
