ARM Mali-G78 MP24 vs PowerVR GXA6850 vs ARM Mali-G72 MP18

ARM Mali-G78 MP24

The ARM Mali-G78MP24 is an integrated high-end graphics card for ARM based SoCs (mostly Android based). It was introduced late 2020 in the HiSilicon Kirin 9000 (e.g. Huawei Mate 40). It integrates all of the 24 possible cores and is based on the second generation of the Valhal architecture. According to ARM it offers two new features: asynchronous top level and fragment dependency tracking.

The graphics card is one of the fastest in Android devices of 2020 and therefore able to run all games fluently.

The GPU supports all modern graphics APIs like OpenGL ES 3.2, Vulkan 1.1 and OpenCL 2.0.

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 MP18

The ARM Mali-G72 MP18 is an integrated high-end graphics card for ARM based SoCs (mostly Android based). It was introduced in early 2018 in the Exynos 9810 (e.g. Galaxy S9). It integrates 18 of the 32 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.

In our benchmarks it slightly below a Adreno 540 and is therefore suitable for demanding mobile games.

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