ARM Says Upcoming Mali-T658 Mobile GPU Can Produce PlayStation 3-Quality Graphics

Posted 11/10/2011 at 11:04am | by Brad Chacos

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Remember our quick blurb about how Android’s Ice Cream Sandwich was going to turn mobile devices into portable gaming machines thanks to its gamepad and HDMI support? At the time, we thought playing Game Dev Story on a big screen would be cool. Our excitement factor just increased ten-fold on the heels of ARM’s announcement of the new eight-core Mali-T658 mobile GPU, which ARM claims can pump out Playstation 3-quality graphics on mobile devices and smart TVs. There’s a catch, though.

ARM says the Mali-T658 will be ten-times more powerful than the Mali-400 GPU that’s currently kicking ass in Samsung’s Galaxy S II phones, according to AnandTech. It’s actually two generations out; the next-gen ARM GPU based on the company’s new Midgard architecture, the Mali-T604, isn’t slated to show up in smartphones until sometime next year. The Mali-T658 will be four times more powerful than even that as-yet-unseen GPU, thanks to its scaling graphics capabilities – which should help keep energy use down – across up to eight cores.

The catch we mentioned? You won’t be seeing those turbocharged graphics anytime soon. A quad-core version of the Mali-T658 isn’t expected to become available until late in 2013, and the full-blown eight-core model won’t hit the streets until 2015.

Image credit: AnandTech.com