 So we're here at the ARM TechCon, so who are you? Hi, I'm Dan Wilson, I'm product manager for some of the Mali graphics processors based at ARM in Cambridge in England. So here you had the session, you were just talking about the Mali 470 GPU, this for wearables, is that what it is? Yes, absolutely, wearables, ultra low power devices were a key input into design of this graphics processor. So what do you need to consider when you do wearables, or this processor, this is GPU that you call about energy efficiency, right? Yeah, absolutely, and I mean dynamic and static power are both very key considerations in creating this GPU in order to ultimately with the aim of increasing battery life of wearable devices. So prior to this slide here, we've looked at dynamic and the static power changes which have occurred within the graphics processor, and we can see the result of all of those changes was a step change increase in energy efficiency compared with the previous generation of Mali graphics processors. So we can see the Mali 400, Mali 450, very much established within the market there, on the graph on the left hand side there in grey, and then the Mali 470 in green, and this graph is showing the normalized energy efficiency in FPS, so performance per milliwatt across the generation of the Mali 400 series. And you can see we get a 2x increase in energy efficiency as a result of all of those changes. 2x energy efficiency, that's the most important thing for our ARM processors, right? Yeah, absolutely, I mean half the power consumption is what we're talking about here, so it's a major reduction. So one thing people want with a smartwatch, they want longer battery life. Yeah, absolutely. That's the most important thing, right? Yeah, and I think in terms of the graphics subsystem obviously there are a lot of components within a smartwatch, and we think that every provider of IP or components into those devices needs to do their bit to reduce their power consumption so we can get towards that kind of like one week between battery charges. And on the graphics subsystem side, which is what we're talking about with the Mali 470, we think we've done that, we've halved the power consumption and now we just need to get all the other components in the same shape. And on the ARM CPU side, people would use Cortex A7 or maybe the new A35? Yeah, absolutely, I mean A7 or A35 as you saw was launched a couple of days ago. It would be a very, very good fit and companion for this GPU. And we see on this side as well, ultimately this GPU is designed to work alongside the latest versions of Android, Android Wear, other Linux kernel based operating systems running on those Cortex A class processors. And very much so with the Mali graphics processors is that the driver stack as a deliverable is equally important as the hardware. We employ as many software engineers as we do harder engineers creating that driver stack on the software side. And you can go to MaliDeveloper.com and look at the open source Linux kernel driver for example for that Mali graphics driver as well as a whole load of other software resources for the Mali GPUs. So what you are making possible is that people have fast framerate, Android Wear, cool smartwatch with a week or more battery life? Absolutely, yeah, it's all about reducing power consumption dramatically across performance points. So when you're interacting with the device you want that really slick kind of smart phone experience has to be very responsive, high framerate. But then for a lot of the time when you're just displaying the time on your watch then we need to be extremely energy efficient in that mode as well in order to get you that long battery life overall across those operating modes. Do you work together with display makers? Like maybe they come with new displays that have one frame per second or even like no frame per second, you know, like do you work with e-ink or with memory LCD or these guys, they have special LCDs that might have different framerates and all that, can they support it? So display technology is very, very important. So the graphics processing side is one step removed from the display. So we don't actually interface the display control on the graphics side. We have other IP that does that display processor IP and on that side we very much do work with those companies closely. But on the graphics side the great thing about graphic processors is that they only update the frame buffer when there is a change. So the control of the framerate isn't based on display technology for a graphics processor, it's based on how the content creator, the user interface designer, how responsive they want their user interface to be which determines the framerate. So from the graphics processor side it is decoupled. It wouldn't matter what the final display technology is. Is this Mali 470 going to be not only in smartwatches, right? Could it be anywhere? Could it be in smartphones? It could certainly be in smartphones. I mean ultimately the high level aim for this project was to bring the smartphone experience into other classes of the device. So wearable devices, IOT applications where the power constraints are higher than in smartphone. Now low power is a great thing. So will it be used in smartphone? It might. Ultimately having low power in smartphone is very attractive to our partners. But the real aim of the product was to reduce the power consumption to a point where we could apply this kind of graphics to other classes of devices, not just smartphone. But so for the smartphone it doesn't take anything away? Like all the stuff the smartphones need to do it can support? Yeah, exactly. And the great thing about this development actually is that in terms of performance we've maintained performance and in some cases exceeded it versus the previous generation. So we haven't just reduced the absolute power but we've managed to do that whilst maintaining the peak performance as well. So for that reason I think the answer to the question is yes. It could be seen here in smartphone. So you were talking about the dynamic and the static, right? What does that mean? Yeah, so dynamic power is ultimately when the product is actually doing something. When you're rendering a frame and all of the blocks within the GPU are switching on and off, you're getting signal transitions within design and that is consuming dynamic power. Whereas static power here is kind of just the leakage power. So the power that regardless of the workload you're doing is always going to be burnt just through the natural characteristics of the silicon technology that it's working on. So within that interactive mode of operation I mentioned before when you have high frame rates dynamic power dominates. But a lot of the time you've just got the watch being displayed or the watch face being displayed here showing the time and you're going to be updating that display the maximum of one frame per second as the second hand kind of rotates around on the display. So it's a really low performance point and then static power becomes really important. So we have to be able to save both. Alright, so Mali 400, Mali 450, would you also working on those? Yeah, I'm the product manager for all three of these products. Have you been surprised by the success of Mali? Because it's huge, no? Well I guess I have the benefit of being able to look at how our product stacks up against the competition. So it kind of sounds arrogant and it's not meant to be. Am I surprised? No, but only because I've got the information. But I think it's fantastic that it's been as successful as it has been. And ultimately we can't be complacent because the industry keeps moving. Requirements keep changing. Performance point requirements keep changing. It has to be power budgets. So we've just got to keep developing and so with the Mali 470 we are basically having a new 2016 refresh of this very successful GPU. So 2016 that means you're working right now under development? No, development. This is a stage, right? What is going on right now? Sorry, so development is finished. So from our point of view in terms of the hardware. It's finished. Yeah, it's in the hands of our silicon partners. And then there's this kind of like the nature of our business is that there's a delay between licensing of a new product and when it ultimately appears in final devices. Because there's a lot of stages. It's got to be designed into a silicon chip and that silicon chip has to go into devices which are designed. So about a year is kind of your kind of rule of thumb between licensing a product for us and when it appears in the shops. So yeah, this time next year we expect to see devices of Mali 470. Is it also because it's optimized or designed specifically for newer smaller process nodes or that's not the reason? So there are actually a lot, so partly yes. So there are a lot of very relevant process nodes at the moment where it's a really interesting time. I'm sure we'll see Mali 470 on 16 FinFET nodes. We're going to see it on 28 nanometer nodes. A lot of the new kind of ultra low power nodes and we'll probably also see it on 14 nanometer as well. Because we provide synthesizable IP, our partners can decide which node fits best their use case. So it's going to be fantastic, the efficiency of these processors coming up next year. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that's the goal.