ARM's Mali-400 MP4 is the Fastest Smartphone GPU...for Now
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 11, 2011 1:21 PM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Samsung
- Arm
- Android
- Galaxy S II
- Mali 400
- Mobile
Earlier this morning we published our long awaited review of the Samsung Galaxy S 2. In it we dedicated a few pages to investigating Samsung's own Exynos 4210 SoC. The chip a full featured dual-core Cortex A9 design, comparable to TI's OMAP 4. The big news however is the Exynos 4210 is the first SoC in a smartphone to use ARM's Mali-400 GPU.
Samsung implemented a 4-core version of the Mali-400 in the 4210 and its resulting performance is staggering as you can see above. Although it's still not as fast as the PowerVR SGX 543MP2 found in the iPad 2, it's anywhere from 1.7 - 4x faster than anything that's shipping in a smartphone today.
The Mali-400 MP4 is put to good use in the Galaxy S 2 as our own Brian Klug found it to be the smoothest experience by an order of magnitude compared to any currently available Android phone.
The downsides to the Mali-400 MP4? It doesn't have the best triangle throughput, which could be an issue in future games that may scale along that vector rather than simply increasing pixel shader complexity.
Source: AnandTech - Samsung Galaxy S 2 Review
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tipoo - Sunday, September 11, 2011 - link
Since the rendering techniques are so different this comparison might be futile, but I thought it was interesting that the old GeForce4 MX 460 put out about 38 Million triangles per second. Some of the mobile GPU's are getting up there, and the MP2 of course is already well past it with 65 million.DanNeely - Sunday, September 11, 2011 - link
Triangles really aren't a good axis to compare one once you start getting to GPUs more than 7 or 8 years old. Although geometry processing has surged in the most recent generation of cards, it only increased bot about 2x between the GF5xxx and 2xx series. Improved texture, shading, and anti-aliasing capability returned much better improvements in image quality. Mobile GPUs probably won't evolve quite the same way (higher DPI makes AA much less needed); but they're getting to the point where geometry is going to be mostly maxed out in terms of farther returns for a while.gstrickler - Sunday, September 11, 2011 - link
I know that ARM is generally very good on power utilization, but do we have any power utilization comparisons of these GPUs (or the whole SOC/phone). 2x-4x the performance is great, if it doesn't kill your battery life.Also, any explanation for the difference in performance between the Nexus S (1GHz Hummingbird and an SGX 540) vs the Optimus 3D (1 GHz OMAP4430 + SGX 540) or the Infuse 4G (1.2GHz Hummingbird + SGC 540)? Different GPU clocks? Different number of GPU cores?
jordanclock - Sunday, September 11, 2011 - link
Differences in the CPUs and driver efficiencies.B3an - Sunday, September 11, 2011 - link
The article/review of the actual phone is clearly linked above and if you bothered to look it you'll see that the battery performance is actually better than most other smartphones, even with this being the fastest phone/SoC on the planet. They might not have battery performance tests for playing games but the GPU is still used when using the browser and other stuff, which was tested in the review.room200 - Sunday, September 11, 2011 - link
<i>and if you bothered to look it you'll see that the battery performance is actually better than most other smartphones, even with this being the fastest phone/SoC on the planet. </i>I always find it interesting how there's always someone who jumps in on a poster with a smart-ass comment. It would be so much easier for you to skip the post and shut the hell up. Ooops, look at me; I'm doing it too.
ph0tek - Sunday, September 11, 2011 - link
And yet you post the most stupid and pointless comment here. Nice one moron.coder543 - Sunday, September 11, 2011 - link
I do believe he succeeded in his goal then. People who post moronic comments will not understand how moronic those comments are until someone takes it to the extreme so that they can get a taste of their own medicine, per se. His comment effectively points out how dumb those types of comments are. Particularly the one being sarcastic about him not looking at the link. Gaming deserves its own benchmarks on battery life.. the way gaming uses a GPU is nothing like how a browser uses it.SlyNine1 - Monday, September 12, 2011 - link
Until you look at the ones preceding it. AKA Mine, Yours and anyone else that keeps this crap going.gstrickler - Sunday, September 11, 2011 - link
If I were interested in reading about the phone, I would have read the article. This was a separately published link with the title "ARM's Mali-400 MP4 is the Fastest Smartphone GPU...for Now". If it's about which phone is fastest, then the title is misleading. I came to find about CPUs and GPUs, not about specific phone models.