Arm GPU Gets More AI Muscle

　　ARM announced four new cores for mainstream smartphones and digital TVs, two Mali GPUs and associated video and display cores for them. The news shows that Arm is, at least for now, taking a three-tier approach to machine learning and that China mobile OEMs are becoming increasingly influential.

　　Arm’s new Mali G52 GPU core is aimed at mid-tier smartphones and digital TVs using combinations of Cortex-A72 and -A55 CPU cores. The GPU boosts machine-learning performance up to 3.6x for ImageNet classifiers compared to its existing G51 core.

　　The G52 packs eight execution engines compared to four on the G51, with four lanes in each engine and each capable of up to four 8-bit integer multiply-accumulate operations per cycle. Up to four G52s can be used in an SoC, each executing up to 288 MACs/cycle.

　　For the low end, a new G31 core uses Arm’s Bifrost architecture and targets systems using A55 CPUs. It is Arm’s smallest core to date to support the latest OpenGL ES and Vulkan graphics APIs but provides no specific acceleration for neural nets.

　　The company previously announced that it is preparing dedicated neural-network acceleration cores for premium mobile systems as part of its Project Trillium.

　　“We may not always have a dedicated machine-learning processor in these devices,” said an Arm spokesman.

　　New display and video cores are targeted for use with the G52/31. The D51 display core aims to handle more jobs with significantly fewer accesses needed to external memory. The V61 video core supports 4K resolution at 60 frames/second as well as HDR10 rendering.

　　Arm provided no results of third-party benchmarks for the cores.

　　As of this year, more than a billion smartphones from China’s largest OEMs will be in use, with users outside of China doubling each year. China’s handset makers grew their share of the global pie to 945 million phones, 31% of total handset sales last year, according to stats that Arm showed from market watcher Newzoo.

　　For its part, Arm said that 159 licensees have shipped a total of 1.2 billion Mali GPU cores to date. The cores are currently used in half of all handsets and 80% of digital TVs, it said.

　　Arm’s Mali leads in the mobile GPU space with a 48% share with design wins in handsets, tablets, and TVs as well as some IoT and automotive systems, according to Jon Peddie Research. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon with its Adreno GPUs follows at 25%, and Imagination Technologies, which used to lead the sector, now is in third at 12%.