Arm has announced two new GPUs, the Mali G52 and G31, targeting low-end devices. The announcement comes at a time when the biggest growth in the industry is coming from China, where high-end devices account for over 30% of the global market share of smartphones and Android devices.
The G52 replaces the G51, which had a rather strange design, in the sense that we haven't seen many companies adopt it and add it to their products and were limited to the G71 and G72. The G52 promises quite good performance, as Arm reports a performance increase over its predecessor of 30% (fps / mm²). The improvements in terms of power consumption are more conservative and the performance percentage amounts to 15% compared to the G51.
Another surprising change is the doubling of ALU (Arithmetic Logic Unit) paths within the single-core execution engine. The G52 is the first GPU to double the paths from four to eight, which also means a doubling of ALU performance in a single execution engine.
As for Mali-G31, it is intended to replace Mali-400. Mali-400 is Arm's most successful GPU and perhaps more generally in the Android operating system space since it is still integrated into several new products. However, we have reached a point due to increased requirements, where we need a new ultra-low end GPU, as operating systems and various applications use OpenGLES> 3.0 and Vulkan, something that the old Mali400 cannot handle. G31 is not related to the G52 architecture, as it still uses the traditional quad layout (4 ALU paths) but its overall design will have a performance up to 20% better than the 400.
