PowerVR GX6450 vs ARM Mali-G52 MP6 vs ARM Mali-G51 MP4

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-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.

ARM Mali-G51 MP4

The ARM Mali-G51 MP4 is an integrated mid-range graphics card for ARM based SoCs (mostly Android based). It was introduced mid 2018 in the HiSilicon Kirin 710 and uses 4 clusters (hence the MP4name). 

The G51 is based on the Bifrost architecture and is intended for cheap mainstream phones. ARM suggests typical clock speeds of 650 MHz with up to 6 cores (MP6).

The GPU supports all modern graphics APIs like OpenGL ES 3.2, Vulkan 1.0, OpenCL 2.0, DirectX 12 FL9_3 (versus 11 in the G7x line) and Renderscript.