VR in sight for ARM’s Mali T-880

VR in sight for ARM’s Mali T-880

“Smartphones are as big as we want them to be but more computational power is needed in the graphics and display to get more realism,” Mark Dickinson, ARM’s graphics general told electronics Weekly. “We want quality of pixels not quantity of pixels.”

Although VR has been touted as an imminent killer app for the past 30 years, ARM believes that computing power is now capable of delivering it.

“VR is very dependent on computational power,” said Dickinson. “Head-sets need a high frame-rate to handle panning, resolution needs to be high, there has to be a different image for each eye and there’s a need for very low latency.”

ARM, via its T-880 Mali graphics engine launched earlier this year, is able to deliver all of those, said Dickinson.

“We have a solution to VR on the smartphone,” he said. “Smartphone manufacturers are
seeing VR as one of the use cases.”

Asked when smartphone manufacturers would put VR into their phones, Dickinson replied: “They already have done,” citing the Samsung Galaxy S6 and the Samsung Galaxy Note 4.

ARM can actually boast of a VR design win – the Samsung Gear VR uses ARM’s Mali graphics for its VR effects.