Arm today at the Arm Taipei Tech Symposium has introduced new advanced display processor; the Mali-D71 and two new IP blocks; the CoreLink MMU-600 and Assertive Display 5 focusing on VR and HDR capabilities and implementations.
The quality of the display plays a vital role in delivering a superior experience be it VR games, HDR video playback, it is the most crucial aspect. Visual experience and display technologies are the key selling points these days, with that in mind ARM’s new technology aims to improve innovation in this space.
The Mali-D71 display processor is the first Mali-DPU that is capable of reducing GPU workloads by performing a composition, rotation, high-quality scaling in fixed function hardware. All this happens before the final output is sent to the screen without GPUs involvement.
The Mali D-71 introduces the new Komeda display architecture, combined with the new memory management unit (MMU) and offers up to 4K120fps real-time performance. When driving a single screen, the D71 re-uses the resources of a secondary display thus resulting in a full frame layers being processed. Thanks to significant optimizations in the memory subsystem, the Mali-D71 can sustain up to 4X the delay on the system bus for the same throughput.
The D71 can achieve 2x pixel throughput when operating in a new side-by-side mode thus delivering premium VR 4K120 performance. With CoreLink MMU-600, Arm has addressed yet another key problem, secure content protection for your premium media. The company has focused on tightly integrating a specialized rendered version of CoreLink MMU-600 with the Mali-D71 of which resulting in 55% area saving and 50% latency improvement.
The Assertive display 5 offers HDR management for display pipelines, improved color and gamut management, and enhanced power savings. It is built on its predecessor’s sunlight visibility improvements. The Assertive display 5 can present HDR content both HDR 10 and HLG (Hybrid Log-Gamma) to any characteristic of display and supports HDR-to-SDR and HDR-to-HDR capabilities.
The Assertive display 5 is powered by an iridix8-HDR local tone-mapping engine and includes improved color and gamut management, particularly complementing the HDR content.
All three blocks are developed by Arm to work together and are uniform posses mutual optimizations in order to achieve VR and HDR functionalities. The Mali-D71, MMU-600, and Assertive Display 5 are available now to partners and are expected to appear in devices in 2019.