ARM’s new generation of Mali-G77 GPU with 30% hike in performance

At the same time as the Cortex-A77 announced, ARM also brought a new generation of Mali-G77 GPUs with a new architecture, Valhall. In the three years before this, from the Mali-G71 to the Mali-G76, the Bifrost architecture was adopted, and the structural upgrade is imperative.

In fact, ARM Mali’s performance has been unsatisfactory compared to Qualcomm’s Adreno GPU. From 2016, the first Mali-G71 based on the Bifrost architecture announced that it was looking forward to the performance gains in the Kirin 960 and Exynos 8895.

However, in terms of the final performance, the Mali-G71 and the next-generation Mali-G72 are hard to be said, which directly leads to the performance of the GPUs of the Kirin 960 and 970, which are obviously behind the contemporary Adreno GPU. So after the launch of the G76 in Kirin 980, Huawei also launched a self-developed GPU Turbo technology to make up for the GPU shortboard.

The newly released Mali-G77 GPU adopts the new Valhall architecture design, which brings a new ISA bus and computing core design to make up for the main shortcomings of the Bifrost architecture.

ARM officially claims that the Mali-G77 has 30% better performance, 30% performance improvement and 60% machine learning performance. Performance per mm2 is expected to increase by 1.4 times compared to A76. With the same process and the same performance, the new G77 continues to achieve 30% year-on-year energy efficiency improvements and 50% less power than the Mali-G72.

This also means that the final performance of the Mali-G77 will be close to the GPU performance of the Apple A12, surpassing this generation of Qualcomm Adreno 640. Of course, Qualcomm will also upgrade its next-generation Adreno GPU next year.

In summary, the new architecture of the Mali-G77 GPU will be able to track the current top mobile GPU level in terms of performance, but after the Soc mass production application, the next generation GPU of competing products will also be available, so the future of Mali is still not optimistic.