PowerVR SGX543MP2 vs Mali-400MP
Mali-400 MP is a GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) developed by ARM in 2008. Mali-400 MP supports a wide range of cases from mobile user interfaces to smartbooks, HDTV and mobile gaming. PowerVR SGX543MP2 is a GPU provided by the Imagination Technologies. Imagination’s extended POWERVR Series5XT architecture provides the basis for the PowerVR SGX543MP2. In fact, it is their first GPU to use this architecture.
Mali-400MP
Mali-400 MP is the world’s first OpenGL ES 2.0 conformant multi-core GPU. It provides support for vector graphics through OpenVG 1.1 and 3D graphics through OpenGL ES 1.1 and 2.0, thus provides a complete graphics acceleration platform based on open standards. Mali-400 MP is scalable from 1 to 4 cores. It also provides the AMBA AXI interface industry standard, which makes the integration of Mali-400 MP into SoC designs straight-forward. This also provides a well-defined interface for connecting Mali-400 MP to other bus architectures. Further, Mali-400 MP has a fully programmable architecture that provides high performance support for both shader-based and fixed-function graphics APIs. Mali-400 MP has a single driver stack for all multi-core configurations, which simplifies application porting, system integration and maintenance. Features provided by Mali-400 MP includes advanced tile-based deferred rendering and local buffering of intermediate pixel states that reduces memory bandwidth overhead and power consumption, efficient alpha blending of multiple layers in hardware and Full Scene Anti-Aliasing (FSAA) using rotated grid multi sampling that improves the graphics quality and performance.
PowerVR SGX543MP2
As mentioned earlier, PowerVR SGX543MP2 GPU is a product of Imagination Technologies. Imagination Technologies’s extended POWERVR Series5XT architecture provides the basis for PowerVR SGX543MP2. Imagination Technologies recently released a new series of SGX IP cores, which are based on the POWERVR Series5XT architecture, and PowerVR SGX543MP2 is the first in line. Number of pipelines in PowerVR SGX543MP2 is four and therefore it provides major improvements over the Series5 SGX architecture used in previous SGX IP cores. It provides support for comprehensive vector operations and capability of co-issue due to the usage of extended USSE instruction set. When PowerVR SGX543MP2 is used with applications which are shader-heavy, improvement in performance is high as 40%. Other notable improvements are in the areas of floating-point, removal of hidden surfaces, multi-sampling, anti-aliasing, OpenVG 1.x optimizations, handling color spaces, correction of gamma. Furthermore, cache and MMU performances are improved. An impressive real-world performance of 35 million polygons/sec and 1 Gpixels/sec fillrate at 200MHz is promised to be delivered by PowerVR SGX543MP2. In terms of HD 3D graphics, PowerVR SGX543MP2 has the capability to drive ultra smooth screens. According to Imagination Technologies, the 1st ever POWERVR SGX graphics IP core developed both as a single core and multi-processor system is claimed to be POWERVR SGX543.
Difference between PowerVR SGX543MP2 and Mali-400MP
Mali-400 MP is a GPU developed by ARM, while PowerVR SGX543MP2 is a GPU designed by the Imagination Technologies. Imagination’s extended POWERVR Series5XT architecture provides the basis for the PowerVR SGX543MP2. A benchmark test performed by anandtech shows that Mali-400MP is little behind Nvidia’s Tegra 2 in performance and the PowerVR SGX543MP2 is said to be 3.6 times faster than Nvidia’s Tegra 2. Therefore it fair to say that when comparing PowerVR SGX543MP2 and Mali-400MP, PowerVR SGX543MP2 outperforms Mali-400MP.
References:
www.arm.com
www.imgtec.com