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ARM announces Mali-T658 GPU, claims ten times the graphical performance of today's smartphones

ARM announces Mali-T658 GPU, claims ten times the graphical performance of today's smartphones

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ARM's latest GPU has up to eight cores and ten times the performance of the Mali-T400.

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Mali T658 vid cap
Mali T658 vid cap

We've only barely gotten accustomed to the performance of the Mali-T400 in our brand spanking new Samsung Galaxy S IIs, and here comes ARM with details of another next-gen GPU. The new Mali-T658 is an up-to-eight-core design that builds on the still-in-production Mali-T604, a next-gen chip itself, offering an estimated four times the compute power of that GPU and ten times the graphics performance of the existing Mali-T400, plus a promise to play nice with ARM's big.LITTLE architecture.

ARM's already envisioning PlayStation 3 quality games running on the final silicon when discussing it with the likes of BBC News, and though we've heard claims of console-quality graphics many a time before, it's hard not to be optimistic when ARM-based technology has already come this far. Samsung, LG, Fujitsu and Nufront have already signed on, with actual chips a couple of years out. The question is whether the T658 will still be competitive when stacked up against the likes of Qualcomm and PowerVR, not to mention Nvidia, which has 12-core GPUs right now. More details at our source links.