Arm unveils Mali G2-Ultra NX GPU with neural accelerators in every shader core
Arm has introduced the Mali G2-Ultra NX, a smartphone GPU that places dedicated neural accelerators inside each shader core. The accelerators reuse the GPU’s memory system, coherent caches and control structures, support INT8 and INT16 processing and include hardware-accelerated optical flow for motion estimation. Arm calls it the first AI-native Mali GPU and positions the accelerators for neural graphics at 1 W. The GPU is part of the Arm CSS for Mobile 2 platform.
The GPU reaches up to 24% higher benchmark performance than the previous generation and 14% higher performance in non-AI gaming workloads, Arm says. Its neural graphics features are Neural Super Sampling, which reconstructs a higher-resolution image from a lower-resolution render, Neural Frame Rate Upscaling, which generates intermediate frames, and Neural Super Sampling and Denoising, which combines upscaling with denoising for ray-traced scenes. Arm says frame rate upscaling supports up to 120 FPS for longer gaming sessions. In its Neural Dawn demo, Arm reports up to 4x higher performance efficiency and up to 70% lower external memory traffic.
The new execution engine is the largest update to the Mali instruction set architecture in seven generations, Arm says, with up to 2x more registers per warp. The third-generation hardware ray tracing unit adds support for Opacity Micromaps, which handle complex transparent geometry. Arm reports up to 13% lower DRAM traffic on ray tracing benchmarks, a 30% higher frame rate and up to 70% less ray tracing work in a scene from Moku’s Central Garden.
For developers, Arm offers the Arm Neural Graphics Development Kit with machine learning extensions for Vulkan, plug-ins for Unreal Engine, an SDK for custom engines and tools for profiling, training and model optimization. Arm names integrations with Tencent Games Central Tech’s Magic Dawn engine, Unity China’s Tuanjie Engine and Unreal Engine MegaLights. Keli Zhou, engine lead for Where Winds Meet, says the game will be among the first to bring Arm Neural Technology to players. Arm’s post names no launch dates for devices with the GPU.