If Samsung had the production capability, I would have *loved* to see the Exynos 4210 w/ Mali 400 MP in the new Tab. Something tells me it would have given the T20 a run for its money.

Here's a video of it pushing 1080p at 60fps! It also will do this in stereo.
http://www.engadget.com/2011/03/03/s...dc-2011-video/

That's CRAZY. Not too long ago, this type of performance wasn't possible with desktop GPUs. Now, mobile GPUs are doing this with ease.

I would love to see how the Mali 400 MP fairs with a more conservative resolution and increased shaders/polys. I wonder how closely it falls to the PVR SGX543 (which is a beast of a GPU). According to imagination, the Mali 400 MP looks as though it is around on-par with with the SGX543 at Low Power! It may be more than capable of surpassing it at higher clocks! I'm flabbergasted!

Here's more information on the Mali 400 MP GPU and the SGX543:
http://www.arm.com/products/multimed...ali-400-mp.php
http://www.imgtec.com/news/Release/index.asp?NewsID=428

The spec sheet lists 30M tri's achievable at 275MHz (LP), which is damn impressive . At higher clocks, this number should increase. Also, apparently 4xAA is possible with barely a performance hit! Wow. Lofty claims.

The one thing that the SGX543 seems to have over the Mail 400 MP is OpenCL support, hinted to in the previous link using the USSE2 shader engine. This could be a tremendous advantage for computationally heavy applications, and truly bring desktop-esque performance to this generation of mobile devices. The bottleneck is, at this point, the software to utilize such features. I expect this will be a larger selling point in a year or so, but it's exciting that mobile GPUs are including it.

Interestingly, if Apple's A5 includes the SGX543 as speculated, I suspect developers will have a greater ability to take advantage of this feature, due to the very unified platform. For example, the iPad 'photobooth' looks to use shaders for the realtime manipulation of images taken with the front-facing camera. Could this be simply USSE2 (ie. a shader program), or OpenCL?

So after a little more research, it seems the the Mali 400 MP is capable of running in LP (Low Power) and GP (General Purpose) modes. This means that in LP it is better suited for small devices (eg. phones), though GP should see large performance improvements through a higher clock, and is suitable for larger devices (eg. tablets). In LP, the Mali 400MP runs @ 240MHz and in GP @ 375MHz! What remains to be seen is if the clock and voltage can be dynamically scaled, or if the frequency is somehow baked into the package. I'm guessing the former.

Another thing worth noting is that the Mali uses tile-based deferred rendering, just like the PowerVR architecture. This improves memory bandwidth requirements in scenes with heavy overdraw. With scenes with about 2.5x overdraw, the system should have remarkable framerates. This may give it an advantage over 'brute force' GPUs like the Tegra 2's GeForce ULV that do not implement these features and render unseen pixels. In tegra's defense, they have a technique called 'Early Z' which looks to approach the speed advantages of a tile-based renderer by throwing away unseen pixels rather than writing them to memory.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4144/l...e-smartphone/5

It seems that the Mali 400 MP is a true modern GPU capable of contending with the best. No doubt, the current crop of GPUs should be capable of PS2/XBox level graphics. With Unity 3D, and the Unreal Engine 3 making its way to Android, expect that these devices will be powerhouse performers, with some truly impressive spectacles.