ARM Mali-G71 MP8 vs PowerVR GX6450 vs ARM Mali-G76 MP16

ARM Mali-G71 MP8

The ARM Mali-G71 MP8 is an integrated high-end graphics adapter for ARM SoCs, which was used in combination with the smartphone and tablet chip HiSilicon Kirin 960 in November 2016 for the first time. Based on initial benchmarks, the GPU performance is slightly better compared to the Adreno 530 in the Qualcomm Snapdragon 821. It is therefore one of the most powerful graphics units for (Android) devices in the end of 2016.

PowerVR GX6450

The Imagination Technologies PowerVR GX6450 is a fast mobile graphics solution for smartphones and tablets, which can be found in ARM SoCs such as the Apple A8 (iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus). 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

The GPU is based on the PowerVR Series 6XT (Rogue) Unified Shader architecture and integrates four clusters with two TMUs and 32 FP32-ALUs each. Therefore, the theoretical FP32 (full precision) compute performance per clock is identical to the previous G6430 (also 4 clusters) found in the Apple A7. Thanks to additional dedicated FP16-ALUs, however, the also important FP16 (half precision) performance has been greatly improved.

In the iPhone 6, the GPU should be clocked at around 450 MHz, delivering about 115 GLOPS (FP32). Compared to other mobile graphics solutions, the GX6450 outperforms the Qualcomm Adreno 330 (Snapdragon 800/801) and matches the more recent Adreno 420 (Snapdragon 805). Except for Nvidia's power hungry tablet chip Tegra K1 and its bigger cousin GX6650, the GX6450 is one of the fastest mobile GPUs in late 2014. Even the most advanced games and high resolution displays are handled without any problems. 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 GX6450 implementation in Apple's A8 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 (19 mm² in 20 nm).

ARM Mali-G76 MP16

The ARM Mali-G76 MP16 is an integrated high-end graphics card for ARM based SoCs (mostly Android based). It was introduced early 2019 in the Kirin 990 5G and according to Huawei should be about 6% faster and 20% more efficient than a Adreno 640 in a Snapdragon 855. It integrates 16 of the 20 possible cores and is based on the second generation of the Bifrost architecture. According to ARM it offers improvements in the machine learning efficiency and a bigger tile buffer for 16x anti-aliasing. Compared to the old Mali-G72, the G76 should offer twice the performance per cluster.

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