In an effort to bring about graphics innovation and enhanced mobile user experience, ST-Ericsson has joined hands with ARM. Both have together devised the creation of a Mali technology-enabled development platform for content and application developers and is made available via the ARM Mali Developer Center.
This joint initiative will offer users a better gaming experience in terms of high quality graphics, video and audio on their mobile devices. Further, the user interface will show quicker responses and will be capable of implementing 3D graphics. The ARM Mali Developer Center supplies resources like graphics software development tools, example code, documentation and access to forthcoming hardware via a community-based web portal.
“ARM has welcomed the opportunity to launch this joint initiative with ST-Ericsson. The availability of this development platform will help achieve and accelerate the Mali vision of outstanding graphics in any consumer electronic device. By using the platform, members of the Mali Developer Center will be able to access Mali GPU capabilities early and create outstanding content and applications for the next generation of consumer devices,” remarked Lance Howarth, general manager, ARM Media Processing Division.
“Advanced graphics play a key role in the user experience for a wide variety of portable and consumer devices. Our collaboration with ARM will bring the Mali GPU capabilities to the developer community. With this co-operation we foresee that our customers will benefit from the early availability of a broad range of innovative content for their devices,” stated Marc Cetto, vice president, 3G Multimedia and Platforms Division, ST-Ericsson.
With this platform, the time-to-market of content and applications for next generation devices is minimized. The development board is powered by ST-Ericsson’s U8500, which is said to be first smartphone platform to integrate the ARM Mali-400 OpenGL ES2.0 and OpenVG1.1 graphics processing unit.
Further, the U8500 mobile platform introduces an ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore SMP dual core processor and supports HD video playback at 1080p. U8500-based devices are expected to be introduced in the near future.