Hot on the heels of OpenGL ES 3.0 comes ARM's latest Mali GPU designs, boasting a 50 per cent performance boost. http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2012/08/07/arm-mali-midgard/1
Nvidia have stolen a bit of a march on the mobile graphics front with Tegra, but on the other hand the article already points out the benefit of competitors: platform-independant applications. Even though they don't actually produce any chips, ARM have been a massive success story - I'm not going to complain if they become even more successful on the back of this.
If this really ends up being more powerful than Tegra 3, it makes me wonder if ARM could potentially reach into PCI-e graphics.
Maybe a top end WP8 smart phone could benefit from one of these? Considerign the Xbox Live integration, it could make for some very good looking mobile games.
On the negative side there really isn't a good time to buy a new mobile phone. Every year is seeing HUGE benefits, whether it be battery life or performance, maybe even a bit of both. With such huge leaps from generation to generation it makes buying something a hard justification, personally I'm skipping this year for the hope of Cortex A15's next year as well as these sweet GPUs!
I was thinking the exact same thing. Considering I'm not really rolling in money, I'm going to wait until ARM platforms stop getting multitudes more powerful than previous releases. Technology is never going to stop expanding, but I'd rather get a product when expansion is starting to slow down. For example, comparing Sandy Bridge to Ivy bridge.
I wish you could simply exchange processors or GPU (or CPGPU) in a socket inside tablet/phone/etc The updates in speed is to fast. You need to buy a phone and a tablet (or tv) every year just to get some speed. Imho this is a waste of money and resources.
Space. Especially in mobile devices, there simply isn't the room to accomodate a socketed GPU. Plus you have SoC devices where the main application processor and the video processor/GPU are on the same die; this is extremely common on ARM implementations, as it reduces the signal pathways by many orders of magnitude (though that's probably not the only reason). You also have power considerations: newer generations tend to need more power, or at least have different power requirements, and you would need to replace or tweak the power circuitry every time you upgrade a chip. It'd be a great solution, but the engineering required to achieve it makes my head hurt... Probably the very same reasons that PC GPU manufacturers haven't tried something similar (well...that and it gives them the chance to flog you a new product every 6-12 months!)
There was a proposal a while back to create a system-on-SIM-card which would allow you to replace the SoC inside your phone as and when you wanted. Dunno what happened, mind - haven't heard anything about it for a *long* time. More recently, there was Modu.
why dont you just do like me and buy the latest and greatest at the time and wait till your contract is up to upgrade to the newest thing on the market? And live with there being better tech out there.
If I had a smartphone then yea, I'd do that. But I was referring more toward tablets or ARM based PCs.
Oh I'm fine with living with it, I got my Galaxy S2 in February and I'm absolutely in love with it, one of the best devices I've ever had, it is like a portable emulation device to me. My point is simply in regards to things like the Galaxy S3, yes it is much more powerful but it will be destroyed by next years phones. It is just one of those eternal "there is something right around the corner" things that plagued the PC for years but has settled down quite a bit now. Though I would be more inclined to wait for a couple of months after my contract finishes if something huge was coming out
