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Capt'n Corrupt's Avatar
Posts: 3,524 | Thanked: 2,958 times | Joined on Oct 2007 @ Delta Quadrant
#56
Originally Posted by Kangal View Post
So is the Mali 400 like an SGX543MP4 where it actually has 4 graphics cores working in tandem ... or is it just one core separated into four units to handle different types of graphics handling (shaders, tesellation etc etc).

I would prefer the first method, although it is less power efficient, you will see the performance increase instantly. And since things are already quite power efficient (durr ARM) I think that point is less important.
Whereas the latter may require a specific optimization on the software end to take advantage of its unique architecture ... (and you know how often things are done properly these days).
I would assume that the 4 fragment processors are for calculating shaders and are running simultaneously on different workloads (why else have separate cores?). But I will look into that more earnestly. I'm not sure if any of the current breed of SoC GPUs handle tesellation natively, though I suspect that a talented developer could shoehorn something that functions similar into an algorithm.

It also seems that ARMs drivers specifically take the complexity out of scaling to multiple fragment processors when programming, but I suspect that most SoC GPUs are similar in this regard.

I would love to see the power requirements of the chip overall. Unfortunately this information seems hard to come by!

The Exynos 4210 and Mali400 seems very, very fast, though. I'm looking forward to some proper benchmarks with mature drivers.

The next iteration of the Mali, the T604G, looks to boost this speed by another 4-5x! It may in fact start to rival current console games in graphics, and display this content at 1080p.