Mali-G52 and Mali-G31 announced — two new high area efficiency GPUs by ARM

ARM has just announced their latest GPUs, the Mali-G52 and Mali-G31. The GPUs in your smartphones now have to do more heavy lifting, with higher resolution screens and more graphically complex games. You might expect Smart TVs to be, well, smarter. That’s what these GPUs are here to do.

These two GPUs aren’t the highest performing GPUs — that would be the Mali-G7x series — but they bring new features and higher performance than their predecessors. The Mali-G52 brings Machine Learning (ML) and Augmented Reality (AR) capabilities to mainstream devices, while the Mali-G31 is designed to enable higher performance and efficiency in a Smart TV near you.

The Mali-G52 offers 30% higher performance density, 15% better energy efficiency Meanwhile, the Mali-G31 promises 20% better performance density in a 20% smaller package, than their respective last-generation counterparts. If you prefer to see the raw numbers, the Mali-G52 runs at 850 MHz, delivers a pixel throughput of 6.8 Gpixs/s, and is built on the 16nm process. It can be configured in up to MP4 (quad-core) configurations. Meanwhile the Mali-G31 runs at 650 MHz, has a pixel throughput of 1.3 Gpix/s and will be manufactured in the 28nm HPM process.

Look out for devices featuring the Mali-G52 GPU from HUAWEI, as they are the pioneers of ML in smartphones, and they could really take advantage of their expertise on the software front with these newer GPU. Curiously, there is a Mali-G51 in the market, but no smartphone SoC has been seen sporting it. Hopefully the Mali-G52 will see wider adoption.

Pokdepinion: ARM Mali GPUs have always been lagging behind their Adreno counterparts, but we will see if the Mali-G52’s implementations by ARM’s partners can bring the fight to the mid-range Snapdragon SoCs.