Mali (processor)

Mali
	ARM Cortex A57 A53 big.LITTLE SoC with a Mali-T624 GPU
Release date	2005
Architecture	Utgard; Midgard; Bifrost; Valhall;
Models	See Variants
Cores	1 to 32 cores
Fabrication process	4 to 40 nm
API support
Direct3D	9 to 12
OpenCL	1.1 to 3.0
OpenGL	2.0 to 3.0
Vulkan	1.0 to 1.3

The Mali and Immortalis series of graphics processing units (GPUs) and multimedia processors are semiconductor intellectual property cores produced by Arm Holdings for licensing in various ASIC designs by Arm partners.

Mali GPUs were developed by Falanx Microsystems A/S, which was a spin-off of a research project from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.^[1] Arm Holdings acquired Falanx Microsystems A/S on June 23, 2006 and renamed the company to Arm Norway.^[2]

It was originally named Malaik, but the team shortened the name to Mali, Serbo-Croatian for "small", which was thought to be fitting for a mobile GPU.^[3]

On June 28, 2022, Arm announced their Immortalis series of GPUs with hardware-based ray tracing support.^[4]

Graphics processors

Utgard

In 2005, Falanx announced their Utgard GPU Architecture, the Mali-200 GPU.^[5] Arm followed up with the Mali-300, Mali-400, Mali-450, and Mali-470. Utgard was a non-unified GPU (discrete pixel and vertex shaders).^[1]

Comparison of Mali Utgard graphics processing units
Model	Launch date	Type	EUs/Shader core count	Core clock rate (MHz)	L2 cache size	Fillrate			GFLOPS (per core)	OpenGL ES
Model	Launch date	Type	EUs/Shader core count	Core clock rate (MHz)	L2 cache size	M△/s	GT/s	(GP/s)	GFLOPS (per core)	OpenGL ES
Mali-55/110^{[link removed]}	2005	Fixed function pipeline^[6]	1			2.8		0.1	?	1.1
Mali-200	2007^[7]	Programmable pipeline^[6]	1			5	?	0.2		2.0
Mali-300	2010^[8]		1	500	8 KiB	55		0.5	5
Mali-400 MP	2008		1–4	200–600	8–256 KiB	55		0.5	1.2–5.4
Mali-450 MP	2012		1–8	300–750	8–512 KiB	142		2.6	4.5–11.9
Mali-470 MP	2015		1–4	250–650	8–256 KiB	71		0.65	8–20.8

Midgard

1st generation

On November 10, 2010, Arm announced their Midgard 1st gen GPU Architecture, including the Mali-T604 and later the Mali-T658 GPU in 2011.^[9]^[10]^[11]^[12] Midgard uses a Hierarchical Tiling system.^[1]

2nd generation

On August 6, 2012, Arm announced their Midgard 2nd gen GPU Architecture, including the Mali-T678 GPU.^[13] Midgard 2nd gen introduced Forward Pixel Kill.^[1]^[14]

3rd generation

On October 29, 2013, Arm announced their Midgard 3rd gen GPU Architecture, including the Mali-T760 GPU.^[15]^[1]^[16]^[17]^[18]

4th generation

On October 27, 2014, Arm announced their Midgard 4th gen GPU Architecture, including the Mali-T860, Mali-T830, Mali-T820. Their flagship Mali-T880 GPU was announced on February 3, 2015. New microarchitectural features include:^[19]

Up to 16 cores for the Mali-T880, with 256KB – 2MB L2 cache

Bifrost

1st generation

On May 27, 2016, Arm announced their Bifrost GPU Architecture, including the Mali-G71 GPU. New microarchitectural features include:^[20]^[21]

Unified shaders with quad vectorization
Scalar ISA
Clauses execution
Full cache coherency
Up to 32 cores for the Mali-G71, with 128KB – 2MB L2 cache
Arm claims the Mali-G71 has 40% more performance density and 20% better energy efficiency than the Mali-T880

2nd generation

On May 29, 2017, Arm announced their Bifrost 2nd gen GPU Architecture, including the Mali-G72 GPU. New microarchitectural features include:^[22]^[23]

Arithmetic optimizations and increased caches
Up to 32 cores for the Mali-G72, with 128KB – 2MB L2 cache
Arm claims the Mali-G72 has 20% more performance density and 25% better energy efficiency than the Mali-G71

3rd generation

On May 31, 2018, Arm announced their Bifrost 3rd gen GPU Architecture, including the Mali-G76 GPU. New microarchitectural features include:^[24]^[25]

8 execution lanes per engine (up from 4). Doubled pixel and texel throughput
Up to 20 cores for the Mali-G76, with 512KB – 4MB L2 cache
Arm claims the Mali-G76 has 30% more performance density and 30% better energy efficiency than the Mali-G72

Valhall

1st generation

On May 27, 2019, Arm announced their Valhall GPU Architecture, including the Mali-G77 GPU, and in October Mali-G57 GPUs. New microarchitectural features include:^[26]^[27]^[28]

New superscalar engine
Simplified scalar ISA
New dynamic scheduling
Up to 16 cores for the Mali-G77, with 512KB – 2MB L2 cache
Arm claims the Mali-G77 has 30% more performance density and 30% better energy efficiency than the Mali-G76

2nd generation

On May 26, 2020, Arm announced their Valhall 2nd Gen GPU Architecture, including the Mali-G78. New microarchitectural features include:^[29]^[30]^[31]

Asynchronous clock domains
New FMA units and increase Tiler throughput
Up to 24 cores for the Mali-G78, with 512KB – 2MB L2 cache
Arm Frame Buffer Compression (AFBC)
Arm claims the Mali-G78 has 15% more performance density and 10% better energy efficiency than the Mali-G77

3rd generation

On May 25, 2021, Arm announced their Valhall 3rd Gen GPU Architecture (as part of TCS21), including the Mali-G710, Mali-G510, and Mali-G310 GPUs. New microarchitectural features include:^[32]^[33]^[34]

Larger shader cores (2x compared to Valhall 2nd Gen)
New GPU frontend, Command Stream Frontend (CSF) replaces the Job Manager
Up to 16 cores for the Mali-G710, with 512KB – 2MB L2 cache
Arm claims the Mali-G710 has 20% more performance density and 20% better energy efficiency than the Mali-G78

4th generation

On June 28, 2022, Arm announced their Valhall 4th Gen GPU Architecture (as part of TCS22), including the Immortalis-G715, Mali-G715, and Mali-G615 GPUs. New microarchitectural features include:^[4]^[35]

Ray Tracing support (hardware-based)
Variable Rate Shading^[36]
New Execution Engine, with doubled the FMA block, Matrix Multiply instruction support, and PPA improvements
Arm Fixed Rate Compression (AFRC)
Arm claims the Immortalis-G715 has 15% more performance & 15% better energy efficiency than the Mali-G710^[37]

5th generation

On May 29, 2023, Arm announced their 5th Gen Arm GPU Architecture (as part of TCS23), including the Immortalis-G720, Mali-G720 and Mali-G620 GPUs.^[38]^[39]^[40] New microarchitectural features include:^[41]

Deferred vertex shading (DVS) pipeline
Arm claims the Immortalis-G720 has 15% more performance and uses up to 40% less memory bandwidth than the Immortalis-G715

Technical details

Like other embedded IP cores for 3D rendering acceleration, the Mali GPU does not include display controllers driving monitors, in contrast to common desktop video cards. Instead, the Mali ARM core is a pure 3D engine that renders graphics into memory and passes the rendered image over to another core to handle display.

ARM does, however, license display controller SIP cores independently of the Mali 3D accelerator SIP block, e.g. Mali DP500, DP550 and DP650.^[42]

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.^[43]

Variants

The Mali core grew out of the cores previously produced by Falanx and currently constitute:^[44]

Model	Microarchi- tecture	Type	Launch date	EUs/Shader core count	Shading Units (per core)	Total Shaders	Fab (nm)	Die size (mm²)	Core clock rate (MHz)	L2 cache size (KiB)	Fillrate			GFLOPS (per core)	GFLOPS (total)	API (version)
Model	Microarchi- tecture	Type	Launch date	EUs/Shader core count	Shading Units (per core)	Total Shaders	Fab (nm)	Die size (mm²)	Core clock rate (MHz)	L2 cache size (KiB)	M△/s	GT/s	(GP/s)	GFLOPS (per core)	GFLOPS (total)	Vulkan	OpenGL ES	OpenCL
Mali-T604^[45]	Midgard 1st gen	Unified shader model + SIMD ISA	Nov 2010^[46]	1–4	8	8–32	32 28	?	533	32–256	133	0.6 @ 600 MHz		9.6 @ 600 MHz	9.6–38.4 @ 600 MHz	N/a	3.1	1.1 Full Profile
Mali-T658^[45]	Midgard 1st gen		Nov 2011^[47]	1–8	16	16–128	?	?			?			19.2 @ 600 MHz	19.2–153.6 @ 600 MHz
Mali-T622	Midgard 2nd gen		Jun 2013^[48]	1–2	4	4–8	32 28	?	533		?		?	4.8 @ 600 MHz	4.8–9.6 @ 600 MHz
Mali-T624			Aug 2012	1–4	8	8–32		?	533–600		?		?	9.6 @ 600 MHz	9.6–38.4 @ 600 MHz
Mali-T628				1–8	16	16–128		?	533–695		?		?	19.2 @ 600 MHz	19.2–153.6 @ 600 MHz
Mali-T678^[49]				1–8			28	?	?		?		?
Mali-T720	Midgard 3rd gen		Oct 2013	1–8	10	10–80	28 14 10	?	400–700		600 (MP8@ 600 MHz)	0.6 @ 600 MHz		12 @ 600 MHz	12–96 @ 600 MHz
Mali-T760	Midgard 3rd gen		Oct 2013	1–16	14	14–224	28 20 14	1.75 mm² per shader core at 14 nm^[50]	600–772	256–2048^[51]	1300			16.8 @ 600 MHz	16.8–268.8 @ 600 MHz	1.0^[52]	3.2^[53]	1.2 Full Profile
Mali-T820	Midgard 4th gen		Q4 2015	1–4	8	8–32	28	?	600	32–256^[51]	400			9.6 @ 600 MHz	9.6–38.4 @ 600 MHz
Mali-T830				1–4	16	16–64	28 16 14	?	600–950	32–256^[51]	400			19.2 @ 600 MHz	19.2–76.8 @ 600 MHz
Mali-T860				1–16	14	14–224	28 16 14	?	350–700	256–2048^[51]	1300			16.8 @ 600 MHz	16.8–268.8 @ 600 MHz
Mali-T880			Q2 2016	1–16	21	21–351	20 16 14	?	650–1000	256–2048^[51]	1700			25.2 @ 600 MHz	25.2–403.2 @ 600 MHz
Mali-G31	Bifrost 1st gen	Unified shader model + Unified memory + scalar, clause-based ISA	Q1 2018	1–6^[54]	4 or 8	4–48	28 12	?	650	32–512		0.5 @ 1000 MHz		8–16 @ 1000 MHz	48–576 @ 1000 MHz	1.2^[55]		2.0 Full Profile
Mali-G51^[56]			Q4 2016	1–6^[57]	8 or 12	8–72	28 16 14 12 10	?	1000	32–512		0.5 @ 1000 MHz		16–24 @ 1000 MHz	16–144 @ 1000 MHz	1.0^[58]
Mali-G71			Q2 2016	1–32	12	12–384	16 14 10	?	546–1037	128–2048	1850	1 @ 1000 MHz		24 @ 1000 MHz	24–768 @ 1000 MHz
Mali-G52	Bifrost 2nd gen		Q1 2018	1–6	16 or 24	16–144	16 12 8 7	?	850	32-512		2 @ 1000 MHz		32–48 @ 1000 MHz	32–288 @ 1000 MHz			2.1 Full Profile
Mali-G72	Bifrost 2nd gen		Q2 2017	1–32	12	12–384	16 12 10	1.36 mm² per shader core at 10 nm^[59]	572–1050	128–2048		1 @ 1000 MHz		24 @ 1000 MHz	24–768 @ 1000 MHz			2.0 Full Profile
Mali-G76	Bifrost 3rd gen		Q2 2018	4–20	24	96–480	12 8 7	?	600–800	512–4096	?	2 @ 1000 MHz	2 @ 1000 MHz	48 @ 1000 MHz	192–960 @ 1000 MHz	1.1		2.1 Full Profile
Mali-G57	Valhall 1st gen	Superscalar engine + Unified memory + simplified scalar ISA	Q2 2019	1–6	32	32–192	12 7 6	?	950^[60]	64–512	?	4 @ 1000 MHz		64 @ 1000 MHz	64–384 @ 1000 MHz
Mali-G77	Valhall 1st gen		Q2 2019	7–16		224–512	7 6	?	695–850	512–2048	?				448–1024 @ 1000 MHz
Mali-G68	Valhall 2nd gen		Q2 2020	1–6		32–192	6 5 3								64–384 @ 1000 MHz	1.2		3.0 Full Profile
Mali-G78	Valhall 2nd gen		Q2 2020	7–24		224–768	5		759-848						448–1536 @ 1000 MHz
Mali-G310	Valhall 3rd gen		Q2 2021	1	16 or 32 or 64	16–64	6 5 4			256–1024		2, 4 or 8 @ 1000 MHz	2 or 4 @ 1000 MHz	32–128 @ 1000 MHz
Mali-G510				2–6	48 or 64	96–384				256–1024		4 or 8 @ 1000 MHz	4 @ 1000 MHz	96–128 @ 1000 MHz	192–768 @ 1000 MHz
Mali-G610				1–6	64	64–384				512–2048		8 @ 1000 MHz		128 @ 1000 MHz	128–768 @ 1000 MHz
Mali-G710				7–16	64	448–1024			650,850 900		2648			128 @ 1000 MHz	896–2048 @ 1000 MHz
Mali-G615	Valhall 4th gen		Q2 2022	1–6	128	128–768	4							256 @ 1000 MHz	256–1536 @ 1000 MHz	1.3^[61]
Mali-G715				7–9		896–1152									1792–2304 @ 1000 MHz
Immortalis-G715				10–16		1280–2048									2560–4096 @ 1000 MHz
Mali-G620	5th Gen^[62]	Deferred Vertex Shading (DVS)	Q2 2023	1–5		128–640				256–1024					256–1280 @ 1000 MHz
Mali-G720			Q2 2023	6–9		768–1152				512–2048					1536–2304 @ 1000 MHz
Immortalis-G720			Q4 2023	10–16		1280–2048				512–2048					2560–4096 @ 1000 MHz
Mali-G625			Q2 2024	1–5		128–640	4 3			256–1024					256–1280 @ 1000 MHz
Mali-G725				6–9		768–1152				512–4096					1536–2304 @ 1000 MHz
Immortalis-G925				10–24		1280–3072				512–4096					2560–6144 @ 1000 MHz
Mali G1-Pro			Q3 2025	1–5		128–640	3			512–2048					256–1280 @ 1000 MHz	1.4
Mali G1-Premium				6–9		768–1152				512–4096					1536–2304 @ 1000 MHz
Mali G1-Ultra				10–24		1280–3072				512–4096					2560–6144 @ 1000 MHz
Model	Microarchi- tecture	Type	Launch date	EUs/Shader core count	Shading Units (per core)	Total Shaders	Fab (nm)	Die size (mm²)	Core clock rate (MHz)	Max L2 cache size (KiB)	Fillrate (per core)			FP32 GFLOPS (per core)	GFLOPS (total)	Vulkan	Open GL/ES	Open CL

Some microarchitectures (or just some chips?) support cache coherency for the L2 cache with the CPU.^[63]^[64]

Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression (ASTC) is supported by Mali-T620, T720/T760, T820/T830/T860/T880^[65] and Mali-G series.

Implementations

The Mali GPU variants can be found in the following systems on chips (SoCs):

Vendor	SoC name	Mali version
Allwinner	Allwinner A1X (A10, A10s, A13)	Mali-400 MP^[66]^[67]^[68] @ 300 MHz
	A20, A23, A33, A64,^[69] H2, H3, H64, R8, R16, R40, R18	Mali-400 MP2^[70] @ 350/350/350/600/600/?/?/?/?/?/? MHz
	H5	Mali-450 MP4
	H6	Mali-T720 MP2
	H313, H616, H618	Mali-G31 MP2
Amlogic	8726-M series (8726-M1, 8726-M3, 8726-M6, 8726-MX)	Mali-400 MP/MP2^[71] @ 250/400 MHz
	8726-M8 series (M801, M802, S801, S802, S812)	Mali-450 MP6^[71] @ 600 MHz
	8726-M8B series (M805, S805)	Mali-450 MP2^[71] @ 500 MHz
	S905, S905X/D/L	Mali-450 MP3 @ 750 MHz
	S905X2, S905X3, S905Y2, S905D2, S905X4^[72]	Mali-G31 MP2
	S905X5^[73]	Mali-G310 @ 1 GHz^[74]
	S912	Mali-T820 MP3 @ 600 MHz
	S922X, A311D	Mali-G52 MP4
	T966	Mali-T830 MP2 @ 650 MHz
ARM	Morello	Mali-G76
Asus	Tinkerboard, Tinkerboard S	Mali-T760
Baikal Electronics	Baikal-M	Mali-T628 MP8

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