Even G51, they’re confident, can offer good VR performance for the kinds of admittedly simpler workloads they have in mind.
And along those lines, somewhat surprisingly, ARM is rather keen on talking about the VR market in conjunction with G51, even though it’s not their high-performance GPU design.
Broadly speaking, mainstream parts like Mali-G51 end up in equally mainstream SoCs like the Exynos 7870 (Galaxy A-series), as opposed to flagship-level SoCs like the Exynos 8890 (Galaxy S7). That is to say, it’s a mainstream part that has been optimized for performance within a given area – when SoC space and/or cost is at a premium – as opposed to G71’s greater total throughput. If Mali-G71 was the successor to the Mali-T880, then Mali-G51 is the successor to the Mali-T820 & T830. Mali-G71 was the former, and now this week ARM is introducing the latter with the release of the Mali-G51 design. However as our regular readers likely know, ARM doesn’t stop with just a single GPU design rather they have multiple designs for their partners to use, running the gamut from high performance cores to area efficient cores. The first of these new Bifrost GPUs was introduced at the same time, and that was Mali-G71. With Bifrost ARM would be taking a leap that we’ve seen many other GPU vendors follow over the years, replacing an Instruction Level Parallelism (ILP)-centric GPU design with a modern, scalar, thread level parallelism (TLP)-centric design that’s a better fit modern workloads. Back in May the company announced their new Bifrost GPU architecture, a new and modern architecture for future GPUs. These days ARM and its customers are in the midst of a major evolution in GPU design.