Stefan Mileschin

Alongside today’s 76-series CPU and GPU announcements from Arm, the company also has one last product announcement for the day. Joining Arm’s video processor family is a new encode/decode IP block, the aptly-named Mali-V76.

Arm’s Mali video decoders aren’t as flashy as their GPUs and don’t get the same degree of attention accordingly. But for an IP vendor like Arm, they’re an important part of their graphics portfolio and a very necessary counterpart to their Mali GPU designs. So along with the new Mali-G76 GPU, Arm has put together a new video block to go with it.

The new V76 is essentially the successor to Arm’s previous high-end video block, the Mali-V61, which was announced back in 2016. Understandably the world of video encoding and decoding doesn’t evolve at quite as brisk a pace as GPUs, so Arm generally only revises their video blocks at about half the frequency.

Overall the V76 brings a slew of changes to Arm’s video processor ecosystem. On the performance front the new video block offers twice the decode performance of the V61, and on the encode side Arm says that encoding quality has been improved by about 25%. Meanwhile on the features front, the latest block adds support for 10-bit H.264 encoding and decoding, the one major codec/format that wasn’t already present on the V61.

From a hardware perspective, Arm has retained their scalable core design, and the V76 is intended for designs ranging from 2 to 8 cores. Arm’s ambitions are very forward-looking given the longer timeframe between generation, and as a result at a nominal frequency of 600MHz, an 8 core design is slated to be able to decode up to decode videos up to 8Kp60, and encode up to 8Kp30. Or for a smaller 4 core design, that becomes 4Kp120 decoding and 4Kp60 encoding. As previously stated, this is twice the throughput per-core of the V61, meaning that at least at nominal frequencies, this is the first Arm video processor block suitable for 8K video (as well as high frame rate 4K).

https://www.anandtech.com/show/12835...k-video-future