[General Questions and Answers] BigMrB:
Mali-400MP GPU vs Adreno 220 GPU

Mali-400 MP is a GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) developed by ARM in 2008. Mali-400 MP supports a wide range of use from mobile user interfaces to smartbooks, HDTV and mobile gaming. Adreno 220 is a GPU developed by Qualcomm in 2011 and it is a component of the MSM8260 / MSM8660 SoC (System-on-Chip) powering the upcoming HTC EVO 3D, HTC Pyramid and Palm’s TouchPad tablets.

Mali™-400 MP

Mali™-400 MP is the world’s first OpenGL ES 2.0 conformant multi-core GPU. It provides support for vector graphics through OpenVG 1.1 and 3D graphics through OpenGL ES 1.1 and 2.0, thus provides a complete graphics acceleration platform based on open standards. Mali-400 MP is scalable from 1 to 4 cores. It also provides the AMBA® AXI interface industry standard, which makes the integration of Mali-400 MP into SoC designs straight-forward. This also provides a well-defined interface for connecting Mali-400 MP to other bus architectures. Further, Mali-400 MP has a fully programmable architecture that provides high performance support for both shader-based and fixed-function graphics APIs. Mali-400 MP has a single driver stack for all multi-core configurations, which simplifies application porting, system integration and maintenance. Features provided by Mali-400 MP includes advanced tile-based deferred rendering and local buffering of intermediate pixel states that reduces memory bandwidth overhead and power consumption, efficient alpha blending of multiple layers in hardware and Full Scene Anti-Aliasing (FSAA) using rotated grid multi sampling that improves the graphics quality and performance.

Adreno 220

In 2011 Qualcomm introduced Adreno 220 GPU and it is a component of their MSM8260 /MSM8660 SoC. Adreno 220 supports console-quality 3D graphics and high-end effects such as vertex skinning, full-screen post-processing shader effects, dynamic lighting with full-screen alpha blending, real-time cloth simulation, advanced shader effects like dynamic shadows, god rays, bump mapping, reflections, etc and 3D animated textures. Adreno 220 GPU also claims that it can process 88 million triangles per second and offers twice the processing power of its predecessor Adreno 205. Further, Adreno 220 GPU claims to boost the performance up to a level that is competitive with console gaming systems. Also, Adreno 220 GPU will allow running games, UI, navigation apps and web browser in largest display sizes with lowest power levels.

Difference between Mali-400MP GPU and Adreno 220 GPU

Based on a research done by Qualcomm using an average of Industry benchmarks composed of Neocore, GLBenchmark, 3DMM and Nenamark, they claim that Adreno 220 GPU in Qualcomm’s dual-core Snapdragon MSM8660 offers twice the performance of the GPU in other leading dual-core ARM9-based chips. Also, a team known as Anandtech has done several tests on Adreno 220 GPU. One of them was the GLBenchmark 2.0, which records the performance of OpenGL ES 2.0 compatible devices such as Mali™-400 MP using two long suites that include a combination of different effects such as direct lighting, bump, environment, radiance mapping, soft shadows, texture based on the use of vertex shader, deferred multi-pass rendering, texture noise, etc. and the test showed that Adreno 220 GPU was 2.2 times faster than the other existing devices such as Mali-400 MP GPU.