ARM announces their second Bifrost GPU – the Mali-G51

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Back in May of this year ARM announced the Mali-G71, the company’s first GPU that utilized their new Bifrost architecture. This new architecture from ARM was quickly adopted into the high-end mobile market, due to growing demand for VR gaming along with other complex and constantly evolving power hungry mobile gaming content. When building their new Bifrost architecture, ARM wanted to create a GPU that could scale to any price point.

Thus, the Mali-G51 GPU was born. Aimed at the “mainstream” smartphone market rather than the high-end market, the Mali-G51 is ARM’s attempt at creating a GPU capable of handling high-level graphics requirements without pushing the cost requirement. The company was able to tune the Bifrost architecture to the performance level and power limitations that most smartphones and tablets have. ARM says they were able to optimize Bifrost’s low-level instruction set even further with the introduction of the new Mali-G51, and they’ve also implemented a new dual-pixel shader core.

ARM states that they’ve also redesigned the texturing units and improved the framebuffer compression as well. There’s been a lot of work put into this GPU over the past 5 months, and ARM is clearly pleased with their results. The Mali-G51 GPU supports scalable performance for the latest graphics APIs including OpenCL 2.0, OpenGL ES 3.2 and the popular Vulkan. When compared to the Mali-T830, ARM says the G51 offers a 60% boost in performance density.

This performance boost is also accompanied by a 60% increase in energy efficiency, and the GPU as a whole is 30% smaller when compared to the Mali-T830 as well. ARM says the Mali-G51 GPU offers sustained performance thanks to the their latest advancements in energy efficiency, which is really important for those long mobile gaming sessions. The company says they will bring the Mali-G51 to its first SoC sometime in 2017, and that means we’ll likely start to see it appear in many mobile devices in 2018 at the latest.