The Mali series of graphics processing units (GPUs) are semiconductor intellectual property cores produced by ARM Holdings for licensing in various ASIC designs by ARM partners.
This line of GPUs was a result of ARM Holdings acquisition of Falanx Microsystems A/S June 23, 2006.
Like other embedded IP cores for 3D rendering acceleration, the Mali GPU does not include display controllers driving monitors (such as the combination often found in common video cards). Instead the Mali ARM core is a pure 3D engine that renders graphics into memory and hands the rendered image over to another core that handles the display.
ARM does, however, license display controller SIP cores independently of the Mali 3D accelerator SIP block, e.g. Mali DP500, DP550 and DP650.
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.
The Mali core grew out of the cores previously produced by Falanx and currently constitute:
Exynos 8895
Helio P23
Helio P30
(nm)
Some Microarchitectures (or just some Chips?) support cache coherency for the L2 cache with the CPU.
Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression (ASTC) is supported by Mali-T620, T720/T760, T820/T830/T860/T880 and Mali-G series.
The Mali GPU variants can be found in the following systems on chips (SoCs):
Mali Video is the name given to ARM Holdings' dedicated video decoding and video encoding ASIC. There are multiple versions implementing a number of video codecs, such as HEVC, VP9, H.264 and VP8. As with all ARM products, the Mali Video Processor is a semiconductor intellectual property core licensed to third parties for inclusion in their chips. Real time encode-decode capability is central to videotelephony. An interface to ARM's TrustZone technology is also built-in to enable Digital Rights Management of copyrighted material.