Arm Announces New Mali-G710, G610, G510 & G310 Mobile GPU Families

The Mali-G510 & G310: Attacking the low-end

In the mid-range, the new Mali-G510 and Mali-G310 are generational improvements over the market predecessors, the G57 and G31. Representing new major jumps in the microarchitectures, these new designs are unnaturally large performance jumps for Arm’s mid-range and low-end offerings.

From a very high view, the G510 scales up from 2 cores to 6 cores, but offers differentiation through changing the number of clusters within one of the execution units per core, or also changing the type of texture units in use, either a 4x throughput unit, or an 8x unit.

On the execution engine side, we always have two execution engines, but it’s possible to configure down one of them to only contain a single cluster, effectively reducing the compute part of the core from a 64 FMA/cycle design to a 48 FMA/cycle design. The reason for such granularity is that the usual customers for such GPUs have hyper-optimised use-cases and will configure their GPU implementation for a specific use-case and criteria, and only use the bare minimum configuration to fulfil those demands, in the smallest possible area.

Arm here puts an emphasis on the 10 different configuration options of the G510 IP, all having different compute or fill rate optimised performance points. It might be quite a bit unintuitive for the every-day reader to understand the need for such configurability, but there are non-mobile markets which really care about every fraction of a mm² when it comes to implementations.

Scaling further below the G510 is the new G310. This GPU is actually a major performance leap compared to the previous generation smallest Mali IP offering, the G31, as we’re seeing the move from a Bifrost architecture to the new Valhall design.

Here, we’re seeing adoption of the new execution engine design, but allowing to further scale down the clusters to only one per EE, and also allowing only one EE in the minimum configuration, allowing scaling of 16, 32, 48 or 64 FMA per shader core. The texture units also scale down to 2 texels/cycle units at minimum, and also seeing a varying unit that’s scaled down compared to its bigger siblings.

The G310 is exclusively a single shader core design, so the configurations are exclusively achieved through changing the different execution units within that core. Unfortunately Arm doesn’t seem to plan out any public naming scheme for the various configurations, so it will be all up to the vendors to actually do any kind of disclosure.