ARM has available for general licensing a new version of its Mali series of graphics processing cores. The new Mali, called Mali-400, has four variants: single core, dual core triple core and four core. The four core can deliver a billion pixels a second or 30m triangles a second.

"It has the lowest memory bandwidth of any GPU (graphics processing unit) which directly translates into lower power consumption", Chris Porthouse senior product manager for media hardware at ARM, told Electronics Weekly.

Low memory bandwidth translates into lower power usage because the GPU is not writing and reading from memory all the time.

The single core version delivers 275m pixels per second, the dual core delivers 550 million pixels per second, and the triple core delivers 825 million pixels per second.

The 275m-1bn pixel per second spread allows licensees to make a wide range of products using the same architecture, and the same software stack, which cuts down their costs, while ARM, as an IP vendor, can spread its cost of developing Mali across many users.

The Mali-400 is designed for 65nm processes. The dual core version occupies nine square millimetres of silicon. "We have customers who are asking us for 32nm and 22nm versions", said Porthouse, "it scales to 32nm quite easily."

ARM has been talking to customers and expects to sign the initial licenses for Mali-400 shortly. "We're very close to signing licenses", said Porthouse.

Clearly the big market is smartphones where every phone will need a GPU, and there are expected, by ARM, to be 600 smartphones made every year by 2012.

The less highly featured 'featurephones' will not all have GPUs but will still represent a 400m annual unit market for GPUs by 2012, reckons ARM.

Other markets products which may in part use GPUs are portable media players (ARM reckons a 200m unit market by 2012), Sat-Nav (65m units by 2012) and HD screens are driving a rapidly growing market for high-end GPUs in set top box (231m units by 2012) and digital TV 113m units by 2012). So ARM's looking at a substantial unit target market in the next four years.

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