While most eyes have been on AMD and their first APU, Zacate; ARM has revealed the new Mali T-604 OpenCL GPU.  Their choice of OpenCL over CUDA speaks to ARMs long history of supporting open standards, something that OpenCL is while nVIDIA’s solution is at least for now considered proprietary.  They’ve also chosen a very different route, siting memory bandwidth limitations as a reason for eschewing textures in favour of directly computing screen data.  As they told The Inquirer during their interview, the chip can handle 1080p video so this decision certainly seems to have merit, especially with the interest Samsung has shown in the T-604.


“THE DECISION of British chip design outfit ARM to update its Mali GPU extending support for OpenCL could signal the dawn of mainstream GPGPU use.

The Mali-T604 GPU is the firm’s fourth generation GPU and the third chip to offer a programmable GPU. Except now the firm has included OpenCL support on both the CPU and GPU cores. This got us wondering whether ARM really was stepping into the accelerator market, or whether it was merely extending the capabilities of mobile devices.”

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