Gadgetory

hello my name is Gary Sims rounder Authority we're here today at the arm techcon 2015 in California and I've got with me mark Dickerson from arm hello mark nice to have you here hello right so does little bit about yourself and what role you have an arm ok so I'm general manager of the media processing group that's the group that are responsible for the development of the graphics processors video display processes everything that's in the vid in the media pipeline in a in the main markets retargeting our mobile but our products go into a quite a wide range of markets mobile being the dominant one obviously video is a big part of the mobile experience from the UI all the way through to gaming so in fact it's a big part of the silicon as well is it on top of on the system on a chip at the GPU is quite a big part absolutely the only again it depends on the exact configuration but typically the GPU could take up to about twenty-five percent of the silicon area so people have to think very carefully about making their choices on the whole of the GPU and the graphics subsystem if you like and making sure that that is you know efficient from an area point of view and power-efficient really because it does you know take up quite a lot of the silicon real estate and you talked about power obviously when we play games we can feel the back of our phones heating up a little bit without 3d graphics of course arms aim is to keep that power consumption as low as possible exactly and another way depends on the range again but if you look at the at the high end it's it's it's more of a how much can I do for the maximum power I can afford within the power envelope we continually strive for more and more capability so if we just reduce the power people going to put more in and so really the way you look at it is is we've got this ceiling we mustn't go past and what can we do with in that ceiling and that ceiling is determined by I would like to be able to play a game for a few hours without having to have my phone you know plugged in now there's also been some new announcements from arm recently the Molly 470 GPU toy tell me a bit about that please yes so one of the areas that's interesting in graphics is is this migration to small form factors things like wearable devices where we want something which is very active and got the sort of you I that you you're used to on a smartphone but is in a different you know in a wearable form factor or a different form factor in fact we've become so accustomed to smartphones that that we that we really demand that sort of high quality of user experience or interaction even if it's something relatively modest and and the 470 is designed exactly for that it's designed to be very small and by extremely power efficient it's fifty percent less power consumption than anything we've done before so a really big step in terms of power efficiency and and it's designed to be supporting the types of applications that you would see for us for a SmartWatch for example and really good look at it two ways as two modes if you like predominantly one is an ambient mode where you just wanted to tell the time and it's updating relatively modestly you want it to absolutely be consumed as little as possible and then as soon as you're reacting and interacting with it you wanted to be just as reactive as your smartphone so then you've got to be you know you've got to have a reasonable graphics performance then to be able to support a very good interactive display so that's really where we're targeting we see we see wearables as one area we still also a lot of potentially new areas in sort of the whole of the IOT area where there will be things that we didn't use to have displays before that will now start having displays whether it be a you know a desk phone for example a printer you know lots of areas where you would want to display that you didn't have one before you want that good graphics experience so the 470 was designed specifically for this low-end IOT and entry smartphone market exactly for the primary primary focus is on power and and and secondary focus on on area because it's also a high-volume market therefore very very cost sensitive so those are two sort of main criteria extra the other end of the market we've got new GPUs coming down the line I know you can't talk much about those but what are some of the factors are driving the GPU market forward so yeah the one of the things that we see in the industry is that we sort of in some sense is saturated on the on the number of pixels if you like on it on a screen we don't need tablets with any more resolution or smartphones with any more resolution because we typically see it I'll come back to that in a second because that's not quite true but so what we're seeing is a much greater emphasis on the complexity that we can support in other words they the finest of the geometry or that or the behavior of the interaction of the graphics within a scene a good example of that would be something like smoke which you know is sort of in a one-hand quite trivial but actually making that realistic in a physics type of way takes a huge amount of computational power and and so the focus if you like is on what I would sort of call quality not quantity in terms of the pixels that we're providing but but let me step back a bit as well because there's one thing that's driving the pixel density as well which is actually virtual reality and there you put huge demands on virtual on the resolution because now you've got to have two images not one and you've got to update them at approximately twice the rate that you would do in the best for the best possible smartphone so 120 FPS is sort of what you need to give your give a low latency experience of you I again and if you see juddering or if you see latency in VR it does have some rather unpleasant side effects on you so VR is driving I wouldn't say it's that you know the dominant feature yet and I think there's still a question mark exactly where it will it'll pan out but it is it is something that we're working very hard on to make sure that our future high-end GPUs support that use case you know very well and of course the gear VR from Samsung of course uses the samsung phones they've all got Molly GPUs in them so that's you actually on the leading edge of that in terms of consumer products as well I'm very glad you brought that up yes absolutely yes though we saw we've been working very closely with Samsung with oculus to try and make sure that we so they've been working with silicon that exists of course that's in their phones today but we've also been working very hard on software to to do some things which and not should we say the first thing that you would think of in the normal graphics case latency I mentioned is one of the areas where you've really got to get that latency down to the minimum for for VR in a game it's less important and you can tolerate a little bit more latency so you have typically in gratitude have quite a deep pipeline of things going on it you've really got to work hard on that with the art ashore t'en at pipeline to give you a very reactive because when you plan your head like this you know you want the world to move with you you don't want it to move slightly later and that drives a lot of the so we don't all work if you like on the software side as well to to improve the optimize the VR use case so that just shows of course that ultimately end experience is always hardware and software combined together and arm does both of course exactly and and it's interesting I mean just in terms of the you know the group that I run a half of the people in it are software engineers so it's it's there's a lot of software to to support as well yeah absolutely that's great mark thanks right well I'm Gary Sims here from tech comm with spring to mark Dickinson from arm thank you very much