ARM Mali-G52 MP6 vs PowerVR GXA6850 vs ARM Mali-G72 MP12

ARM Mali-G52 MP6

The ARM Mali-G52 MP6 is an integrated mid-range graphics card for ARM based SoCs (mostly Android based). It was introduced mid 2019 in the HiSilicon Kirin 810 and uses 6 clusters (hence the MP6 name). 

The G52 is based on the Bifrost architecture and is intended for mainstream phones. ARM claims that the G52 series offers 30% more performance density and 15% better energy efficiency compared to the ARM Mali G51 series.

The performance of the G52MP6 in our benchmarks (in the Kirin 810) is comparable to the Adreno 618 in the Snapdragon 730 and G76MP4 in the Helio G90T.

The GPU supports all modern graphics APIs like OpenGL ES 3.2, Vulkan 1.0, OpenCL 2.0 and Renderscript.

PowerVR GXA6850

The Imagination Technologies PowerVR GXA6850 is a fast mobile graphics solution (mainly) for tablets, which can be found in ARM SoCs such as the Apple A8X (iPad Air 2). The chip is available since Q3/2014 and of one of the fastest solutions in its class at the time of introduction.

Architecture and Performance

In contrast to previous speculations, the A8X integrates an 8-cluster PowerVR Series 6 (Rogue) GXA6850 consisting of two GX6450 GPUs (2x 4 clusters) instead of a single GX6650 (6 clusters). The name GXA6850 has been created by Anandtech, the design may also be called a GX6450MP2.

Each cluster offers four FP16 and two FP32 ALUs, leading to a compute power of about 230 GFLOPS FP32 at 450 MHz (clock rate estimated). The GXA6850 does not only beat the Qualcomm Adreno 420 (Snapdragon 805), but also the Nvidia Tegra K1 by a small margin. Thus, the GXA6850 is one of the fastest tablet GPUs as of 2014 and can handle even the most demanding mobile games in high resolutions. Among others, the GPU supports OpenGL 3.x/4.x, OpenGL ES 3.0 as well as DirectX 10.

Power Consumption

Thanks to the advanced 20-nanometer process and the relatively low clock rate, the GXA6850 implementation in Apple's A8X offers a very high energy efficiency. On the other hand, the GPU has a comparatively "wide" architecture requirering a lot of transistors and die size (about 38 mm² in 20 nm).

ARM Mali-G72 MP12

The ARM Mali-G72 MP12 is an integrated high-end graphics card for ARM based SoCs (mostly Android based). It was introduced in October 2017 in the Huawei Mate 10 and uses 12 clusters (hence the MP12 name). In our benchmarks it performs between a Adreno 530 and 540 and is therefore suitable for demanding mobile games.

The G72 is based on the second generation of the Bifrost architecture and offers improvements in the machine learning efficiency and a bigger tile buffer for 16x anti-aliasing.

The GPU supports all modern graphics APIs like OpenGL ES 3.2, Vulkan 1.0, OpenCL 2.0, DirectX 12 FL11_1 and Renderscript.