ST-Ericsson's U8500 platform gives your next smartphone wicked 3D powers
It's one thing for ARM to develop a potent GPU meant to add impressive 3D capabilities to devices that were previously forced to run the likes of "Snake," but it's another thing entirely to see a platform and semiconductor company come forward and take it one step closer to the mainstream. ST-Ericsson has done just that with its U8500 platform, which is the first to integrate ARM's Mali-400 graphics processing unit into a solution that can be easily fitted into future phones. Think your iPhone 3GS GPU is mighty enough? Hop on past the break and mash play -- it'll make those fancy water reflections you're currently drooling over look downright ugly.
[Thanks Chris]
[Thanks Chris]




















gr8 moves, mista' ! :o
luks like simulated
i saw a movie of a samurai animating, but nothing impressive..that quality 3d was around years ago when i used to work in mobile games.
demos are supposed to be impressive.
As stated by another poster, that's simply part of 3DMark's Mobile GPU benchmark.
From everything I've heard, Mali is a hell of a lot more powerful than PowerVR's current generation (in OMAP3xx and Snapdragon platforms) or the GPU in Tegra Mark 1.
What is this? A GPU for ants!?
it needs to be at least.... 3 times bigger than this!
If I were drinking coffee, it would be all over my screen right now. Lol.
Graphics only impressive when hard stared at from the left. Right only turners not applicable.
Photoshopped. I can tell because of the pixels.
I simultaneously despise you and admire you for that comment.
Rules 1 and 2....
Don't talk about Fight Club?
I love Daisy from geekologie
I'd like to see you make a video (that's not a GIF) in Photoshop.
micro is a douche. ?your comment was funny.
Im leaving that typo
A mix of Youtube, my PC, and the fact the camera isn't zoomed in on the device's screen means I'm looking at an image about .25" across, and I can't quite say I'm impressed. I can't even say that I know exactly what was showing on the screen.
That's the same 3DMarkMobile benchmark that's been around forever. I agree that the Mali 400 can probably do great stuff, but this demo in no way shows it. The iPhone 3GS (and perhaps the iPhone's with the previous gen GPU) could rip that demo apart as well, considering it's written against OpenGL ES 1.1
http://www.futuremark.com/products/3dmarkmobile/3dmarkmobilees11/
check out the lag around the 30 second mark ;)
I see a lot of jerkyness, and no it's not my connection, but it could be the recording device and encoding, but if they want to demonstrate this way.. then they are not doing their job right.
it's the encoding brah
The pockets of the future will be huge!
My pockets are already huge ....
i gettin bulges already.
@Gus Haha, Zoolander need more than just a school for ants :)
No 60fps=FAIL
Your eyes can only see at about 30fps...
Yes and no mark, research it.
Two eyes at 30fps each makes 60fps?
(just kidding)
eyes have gazillion fps, brains are the limiting part and brain doesn't function like lcd. so any of those "eyes dont see above 30fps" is a lot of bullcrap.
I'm sorry, but RE4 iPhone looks A LOT better than this, and it's already out.
you're such an idiot. could you just stop posting? as usual you didn't read anything on the article or the comments at all. this is a standard benchmark for testing what can be rendered and at what speed it can accomplish it at. for all we know, this tech will be in the next iphone. also, that RE4 port for iphone isn't all that impressive and isn't really a good example. RE4 looks just as good on my friends Env Touch as it does on my iphone (albeit smaller). you should really look around before you make your asinine posts.
go. away. NOW.
RE4 looks better and runs better on iPhone and EnvTouch, this benchmark looks bad and runs bad.
Miles, say that again!
you're watching that test on a small part of a youtube video, which is low-res to begin with... of course it's not gonna look greak. the resolution looked bad because of that, but the animations were smooth and everything; i bet it would look awesome in person.
The demo wasn't that impressive graphically, even worse; at times it was kinda jerky. wonder if that platform really is thaat good
yea seems odd how the board looks like a stationary pic (the noise in the video seems to go through state changes and does not look fluid) and then the lcd looks completely alive... just doesn't match up visually. anyways; still looks neat-- i wonder how many triangles it's rendering there
It is hard to tell if it is really good 3d because the screen is so small you cannot tell if there is any real detail on the textures. Usually things like that are done to hide some faults.
What does it do to the battery life?
it looks like they recorded this using an iPhone... and that board isn't going to fit in a phone. or that screen is ridiculously small.
That is a reference board. It is large so that it can be tested, debugged and customised cheaply before it is shrunk down to a small size that will fit into a phone.
Thats all great but I'd prefer mobile phones to become x86 compatible instead.
Like, Windows XP that works for two-three days on a single charge... in a phone!
To bad you guys don't understand what you are looking at. This board was at the ARM conference recently, it blows away anything you are talking about today. There is an ARM Cortex A9 in there, that would be a dual core ARM Cortex A8. And the Mali-400 is a beast!
Forget Snapdragon and Tegra. Those chips are VW Beatles next to this Ferrari. The hardware in the iPhone? Not even close.
Here is a link to the specs.
http://www.stericsson.com/platforms/U8500.jsp
HDMI out would be nice to have on a phone...
Some slightly up close shots of the benchmark in this interview:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4W-Nwz_KEs
Interview is not that great though.
There was a demo similar to this for the Nokia N95 2 years ago, but there was never an actual game with such graphics so i wouldn't get my hopes up.
what I don't understand about these demos is that they always have these tiny screens hooked up to these whales of motherboards. Could someone explain to me why I shouldn't be confused here? Do they just whip something up and worry about cramming it into a smaller form factor later?
Every single possible connections and test pin is brought out to the edge of the board. In your phone the same connections are very, very small and often buried in the board itself. On a development board everything is reachable. Actually in your phone those test pins aren't reachable at all, just a testing port.
Think about your car. It is hard to reach a lot of the stuff in the engine because they crammed into such a small space. Now take that engine and spread it out a lot so that everything was easily reachable. Wouldn't that make your car easier to debug and test? Than when the engine would great you shrink it back down to fit.
(bad analogy but it works)