Arm packs neural accelerators into Mali GPU shader cores

Arm put neural accelerators inside the shader cores of its next mobile GPU, the Mali G2-Ultra NX, announced September 8 as part of CSS for Mobile 2. That moves AI upscaling from a post-processing step into how the GPU runs shaders.

Arm says the chip delivers up to 24% more benchmark performance and up to 120 FPS on mobile. It also cuts external memory traffic by up to 70% compared with native rendering. It's the largest change to the Mali instruction set in seven generations.

The chip ships with three neural graphics paths. Neural Super Sampling and Neural Frame Rate Upscaling raise resolution and frame rate. Neural Super Sampling and Denoising targets ray tracing, where noise cleanup is usually the most expensive pass.

Arm pairs the hardware with the Arm Neural Graphics Development Kit and Unreal Engine plug-ins. That lets studios target the new paths without writing custom inference code.

Arm's post doesn't say which device class ships first or what the power draw looks like against a standard Mali core. It also doesn't list which Unreal Engine versions the plug-ins support.