What is MALI 400 and Cortex Processor ?

The world's first OpenGL ES 2.0 conformant multi-core GPU provides 2D and 3D acceleration with performance scalable up to 1080p resolutions, while maintaining ARM^® leadership on power and bandwidth efficiency.

With support for 2D vector graphics through OpenVG 1.1 and 3D graphics through OpenGL ES 1.1 and 2.0, the Mali-400 MPprovides a complete graphics acceleration platform, based on open standards. Mali is still the only GPU architecture to achieve OpenGL ES 2.0 conformance at 1080p.

Scalable from 1 to 4 cores the Mali-400 MP enables a wide range of different use cases, from mobile user interfaces up tosmartbooks, HDTV & mobile gaming, to be addressed with a single IP. One single driver stack for all multi-core configurations simplifies application porting, system integration and maintenance. Multi-core scheduling and performance scaling is fully handled within the graphics system, with no special considerations required from the application developer

The provision of an industry standard AMBA^® AXI interface makes integration of Mali-400 MP into system-on-chip designs straight-forward, and also provides a well-defined interface for connecting to other bus architectures. 

Mali-400 MP has a fully programmable architecture providing high-performance support for both shader-based and fixed-function graphics APIs. It provides class leading anti-aliasing capabilities ensuring optimal image quality, with virtually no performance overhead. A wide range of third party applications, middleware and tools support through the ARM Mali ecosystem program.  These are pre-validated with other ARM hardware and software products, as well as a wide array of third party applications and content.

Features	Benefits
Advanced tile-based deferred rendering and local buffering of intermediate pixel states	Reduced memory bandwidth overhead and lower power consumption
Efficient alpha blending of multiple layers in hardware	Unlimited number of blended layers without additional bandwidth consumption or unexpected performance drops
Full Scene Anti-Aliasing (FSAA) using rotated grid multi sampling	Significantly higher quality and performance than alternative oversampling methods
Integrated MMU based on standard ARM MMU	Allows virtualization of GPU memory resources and fine-grained memory protection
Fully autonomous GPU	Enables maximum parallelization of CPU and GPU tasks
Independent CPU and GPU power management	Maximize battery life, minimize heat dissipation
Fully optimized production quality software drivers	Maximum efficiency with low memory fragmentation, reduced integration time and cost, reduced support burden

Processor IP
ARM1176JZF-S	The highest performance uni-processor in the Classic ARM processor family. Widely licensed for a vast array of applications it is used in today's leading-brand mobile handsets, set-top boxes, digital TVs, high-end photo frames and many other applications.
ARM11 MPCore	This processor was the first to introduce multi-core technology and continues to be licensed for a wide array of applications including mobile handset, navigation devices, and Smartbook applications.
Cortex-A5	The smallest, lowest power ARM multicore processor capable of delivering the Internet to the widest possible range of devices: from ultra low cost handsets, feature phones and smart mobile devices, to pervasive embedded, consumer and industrial devices.
Cortex-A8	The ARM Cortex-A8 processor has the ability to scale in speed from 600MHz to greater than 1GHz, meeting the requirements for power-optimized mobile devices needing operation in less than 300mW; and performance-optimized consumer applications requiring 2000 Dhrystone MIPS.
Cortex-A9	Available as either a single core or configurable multicore processor, the Cortex-A9 processor can scale across a wide variety of applications making it an ideal solution for designs requiring high performance in low power or thermally constrained cost-sensitive devices.