Mali200 – Graphics from Norway

Mali200 is the name of a graphic circuit developed by the Norwegian company Falanx Microsystems. Falanx was founded in 2001 and been focusing on the mobile market with IP graphic cores. Everything from cell phones to portable game consoles uses Falanx circuits. Now it has launched a new arcitecture for Mali200 its a model just might appear as an integrated circuit on a mainboard near you in the future. According to Falanx Mali200 would be able to, during 2006, offer performance much better than other integrated circuits and will be able to keep up with external solutions.

One of the key parts of the Mali200 is its handling of the bandwidth that will result in 4X antaialising without any increase, and at the same time use 80% less bandwidth for similar effects. Mali200 is something completely new if take a closer look at its arcitcture, or how would you react to 1 pixel pipeline. However with Mali200 it is in theory possible to add up as many circuits as you want as it is based on a modular design.

“With its unique and intelligent pixel processing abilities and modular nature, the Mali200 is ideal for use in any multimedia device requiring high performance and low power, such as mobile phones, personal media players and laptops. This scalability is further enhanced with support for OpenGL ES 2.0, which is designed to bring OpenGL to multiple platforms like set-top boxes, auto navigation systems and even state-of-the-art game consoles such as the “PLAYSTATION® 3.” The Mali200™ architecture allows for multiple cores to be parallelized in larger footprint SoCs for desktop and integrated graphics processing applications.”

There are still a lot of things that needs to be solved before we will actually see Mali200 in regular computers but the technology sure looks interesting. At HardOCP they done a preview of Falanx new circuit and it can be found here.

:: Falanx homepage