ARM introduced the Mali-T604 graphics processing unit (GPU) at the ARM Technology Conference 2010 in Santa Clara today.
"Delivering up to 5x performance improvement over current Mali graphics processors, the T604 is currently available to license by lead partners," said the firm. "Samsung will be the first ARM Partner who can gain access to theT604."
This is ARM's fourth-generation GPU, and has been specifically designed to meet the needs of 'general purpose computing on GPU' (GPGPU).
"Support for GPGPU is becoming increasingly important for augmented reality applications and gesture recognition," said ARM.
API support has been extended to include full profile Khronos OpenCL and Microsoft DirectX.
ARM claims memory bandwidth consumption has been cut by up to 30%, to increases energy efficiency.
"The T604 fully exploits our cache coherent interconnect [CCI-400] to deliver a memory coherent system with the recently announced Cortex-A15 core," said the firm.
At the same time, ARM announced the CoreLink 400 series of AMBA 4 protocol-compliant system intellectual property (IP) which will work with multi-core combinations including Mali-T604 - Cortex-A15.
"Designed for complex SoCs featuring clusters of multicore processors, CoreLink 400 enables designers to resolve the critical issues of coherency, virtualisation, latency and power management to ensure each processor is able to share memory resources and maximise overall system performance," claimed ARM.
CoreLink 400 includes a new configurable, non-blocking, NIC-400 network interconnect with lower latency and power consumption compared with the firm's previous offering.
It supports quality of service and introduces virtual networks to "ensure the GPU gets the bandwidth required and minimising latency for the CPU", said ARM.
The dynamic memory controller provides a multi-channel interface to low power DDR2 (LPDDR2) and DDR3.