Mali

ARM Cortex A57 A53 big.LITTLE SoC with a Mali-T624 GPU
Release date	2005
Architecture	Utgard Midgard Bifrost Valhall
Models	See Variants
Cores	1-32 cores
Fabrication process	4-40 nm
API support
OpenCL	1.1-3.0
Vulkan	1.0-1.3

The Mali and Immortalis series of graphics processing units (GPUs) and multimedia processors are semiconductor intellectual property cores produced by Arm Holdings for licensing in various ASIC designs by Arm partners.

Mali GPUs were developed by Falanx Microsystems A/S, which was a spin-off of a research project from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.^[1] Arm Holdings acquired Falanx Microsystems A/S on June 23, 2006 and renamed the company to Arm Norway.^[2]

It was originally named Malaik, but the team shortened the name to Mali, Serbo-Croatian for "small", which was thought to be fitting for a mobile GPU.^[3]

On June 28, 2022, Arm announced their Immortalis series of GPUs with hardware-based Ray Tracing support.^[4]

GPU Architectures

Utgard

In 2005, Falanx announced their Utgard GPU Architecture, the Mali-200 GPU.^[5] Arm followed up with the Mali-300, Mali-400, Mali-450, and Mali-470. Utgard was a non-unified GPU (discrete pixel and vertex shaders).^[1]

Midgard

Midgard 1st gen

On November 10, 2010, Arm announced their Midgard 1st gen GPU Architecture, including the Mali-T604 and later the Mali-T658 GPU in 2011.^[6][7][8][9] Midgard uses a Hierarchical Tiling system.^[1]

Midgard 2nd gen

On August 6, 2012, Arm announced their Midgard 2nd gen GPU Architecture, including the Mali-T678 GPU.^[10] Midgard 2nd gen introduced Forward Pixel Kill.^[1][11]

Midgard 3rd gen

On October 29, 2013, Arm announced their Midgard 3rd gen GPU Architecture, including the Mali-T760 GPU.^{[12][1][13][14][15]}

Midgard 4th gen

On October 27, 2014, Arm announced their Midgard 4th gen GPU Architecture, including the Mali-T860, Mali-T830, Mali-T820. Their flagship Mali-T880 GPU was announced on February 3, 2015. New microarchitectural features include:^[16]

• Up to 16 cores for the Mali-T880, with 256KB – 2MB L2 cache

Bifrost

Bifrost 1st Gen

On May 27, 2016, Arm announced their Bifrost GPU Architecture, including the Mali-G71 GPU. New microarchitectural features include:^[17][18]

• Unified shaders with quad vectorization
• Scalar ISA
• Clauses execution
• Full cache coherency
• Up to 32 cores for the Mali-G71, with 128KB – 2MB L2 cache
• Arm claim the Mali-G71 has 40% more performance density and 20% better energy efficiency than the Mali-T880

Bifrost 2nd gen

On May 29, 2017, Arm announced their Bifrost 2nd gen GPU Architecture, including the Mali-G72 GPU. New microarchitectural features include:^[19][20]

• Arithmetic optimizations and increased caches
• Up to 32 cores for the Mali-G72, with 128KB – 2MB L2 cache
• Arm claim the Mali-G72 has 20% more performance density and 25% better energy efficiency than the Mali-G71

Bifrost 3rd Gen

On May 31, 2018, Arm announced their Bifrost 4rd gen GPU Architecture, including the Mali-G76 GPU. New microarchitectural features include:^[21][22]

• 8 execution lanes per engine (up from 4). Doubled pixel and texel throughput
• Up to 20 cores for the Mali-G76, with 512KB – 4MB L2 cache
• Arm claim the Mali-G76 has 30% more performance density and 30% better energy efficiency than the Mali-G72

Valhall

Valhall 1st Gen

On May 27, 2019, Arm announced their Valhall GPU Architecture, including the Mali-G77 GPU, and in October Mali-G57 GPUs. New microarchitectural features include:^[23][24][25]

• New superscalar engine
• Simplified scalar ISA
• New dynamic scheduling
• Up to 16 cores for the Mali-G77, with 512KB – 2MB L2 cache
• Arm claim the Mali-G77 has 30% more performance density and 30% better energy efficiency than the Mali-G76

Valhall 2nd Gen

On May 26, 2020, Arm announced their Valhall 2nd Gen GPU Architecture, including the Mali-G78. New microarchitectural features include:^[26][27][28]

• Asynchronous clock domains
• New FMA units and increase Tiler throughput
• Up to 24 cores for the Mali-G78, with 512KB – 2MB L2 cache
• Arm Frame Buffer Compression (AFBC)
• Arm claim the Mali-G78 has 15% more performance density and 10% better energy efficiency than the Mali-G77

Valhall 3rd Gen

On May 25, 2021, Arm announced their Valhall 3rd Gen GPU Architecture (as part of TCS21), including the Mali-G710, Mali-G510, and Mali-G310 GPUs. New microarchitectural features include:^[29][30][31]

• Larger shader cores (2x compared to Valhall 2nd Gen)
• New GPU frontend, Command Stream Frontend (CSF) replaces the Job Manager
• Up to 16 cores for the Mali-G710, with 512KB – 2MB L2 cache
• Arm claim the Mali-G710 has 20% more performance density and 20% better energy efficiency than the Mali-G78

Valhall 4th Gen

On June 28, 2022, Arm announced their Valhall 4th Gen GPU Architecture (as part of TCS22), including the Immortalis-G715, Mali-G715, and Mali-G615 GPUs. New microarchitectural features include:^[4][32]

• Ray Tracing support (hardware-based)
• Variable Rate Shading^[33]
• New Execution Engine, with doubled the FMA block, Matrix Multiply instruction support, and PPA improvements
• Arm Fixed Rate Compression (AFRC)
• Arm claim the Immortalis-G715 has 15% more performance & 15% better energy efficiency than the Mali-G710^[34]

5th Gen

On May 29, 2023, Arm announced their 5th Gen Arm GPU Architecture (as part of TCS23), including the Immortalis-G720, Mali-G720 and Mali-G620 GPUs.^[35][36][37] New microarchitectural features include:^[38]

• Deferred vertex shading (DVS) pipeline
• Arm claim the Immortalis-G720 has 15% more performance and uses up to 40% less memory bandwidth than the Immortalis-G715

Technical details

Like other embedded IP cores for 3D rendering acceleration, the Mali GPU does not include display controllers driving monitors, in contrast to common desktop video cards. Instead, the Mali ARM core is a pure 3D engine that renders graphics into memory and passes the rendered image over to another core to handle display.

ARM does, however, license display controller SIP cores independently of the Mali 3D accelerator SIP block, e.g. Mali DP500, DP550 and DP650.^[39]

ARM also supplies tools to help in authoring OpenGL ES shaders named Mali GPU Shader Development Studio and Mali GPU User Interface Engine.

Display controllers such as the ARM HDLCD display controller are available separately.^[40]

Variants

The Mali core grew out of the cores previously produced by Falanx and currently constitute:^[41]