ARM has announced its most powerful graphics processor (GPU) and 'compute engine' - while refusing to reveal performance metrics.
Called Mali-T658, it "delivers up to ten times the graphics performance of the Mali-400 MP GPU. It also features four times the GPU compute performance of the Mali-T604 GPU," is all the firm will say.
Compared with 604, it has double the number of shader cores per GPU and double the number of arithmetic pipelines per shader core.
ARM marketing director Ian Smythe added that the number of threads has doubled to 2,000.
The architecture is 'Midgard', which was first implemented in the 604. Midgard was specifically designed to allow high-speed number-crunching as well as graphics processing, so the 600 series can execute Open CL computation APIs as well as Open GL ES graphics APIs.
200, 300 and 400 series Mali GPUs are purely graphics engines.
The 658 API list includes: Microsoft DirectX 11 and DirectCompute; Khronos OpenGL ES, OpenVG and OpenCL; and Google Renderscript. 
When will we see them?
According to Smythe, the firm sees the new GPU appearing in top-end phones towards the end of 2013 with T658 partnered with two Cortex-A15 and two Cortex-A7 CPUs.
By 2016, he sees the same four CPUs alongside the maximum of eight 658s.
High-definition gaming is the obvious use for all the graphics power, but why such a vast computational capability?
"It will be used for image processing: running filters across images, augmented reality overlays, natural speech recognition and off-loading more physics calculations for video games from the CPU," Smythe told Electronics Weekly - leaving the CPU to handle always-on always-connected tasks. 
