Mali T760 GPGPU (Exynos 5433 SoC): FP64 Champion – Adreno Killer?

What is Mali? What is Exynos?

“Mali” is the name of ARM’s own “standard” GPU cores that complement the standard CPU cores (Cortex). Many ARM CPU licensors integrate GPU cores from other vendors in their SoCs, e.g. Imagination, Vivante, Adreno rather than the default Mali.

Mali Series 700 is the 3-rd generation “Midgard” core that complement’s ARM’s 64-bit ArmV8 Cortex 5X designs and thus used in the very latest phones/tablets and has been updated to include support for new technologies like OpenCL ES, OpenGL ES and DirectX.

“Exynos” is the name of Samsung’s line of SoCs that is used in Samsung’s own phones/tablets/TVs. Series 5 is the 5-th generation SoC generally using ARM’s “big.LITTLE” architecture of “small” cores for low-power and “big” cores for performance. 5433 is the 1st 64-bit SoC from Samsung supporting AArch64 aka ArmV8 but running in “legacy” 32-bit ArmV7 mode.

In this article we test (GP)GPU graphics unit performance; please see our other articles on:

Hardware Specifications

We are comparing the internal GPUs of various modern phones and tablets that support GPGPU.

Graphics Processors ARM Mali T760 Qualcomm Adreno 420 Qualcomm Adreno 330 Qualcomm Adreno 320 ARM Mali T628 nVidia K1 Comment
Type / Micro-Arch VLIW4 (Midgard 3nd gen) VLIW5 VLIW5 VLIW5 VLIW4 (Midgard 2nd gen) Scalar (Maxwell 3rd gen) All except K1 are VLIW thus work best with vectorised data; some compilers are very good at vectorising simple code (e.g. by executing mutiple data items simultaneously), but the programmer can generally do a better job of extracting paralellism.
Core Speed (MHz) estimated 600 600 578 400 533 ? Core speeds are comparative with latest devices not pushing the clocks too high but instead improving the cores.
OpenGL ES Support 3.1 3.1 3.0 3.0 3.0 (should support 3.1) 3.1 Mali T7xx adds official support for OpenGL ES 3.1 just like the other modern GPU designs: Adreno 400 and K1. While Mali T6xx should also suppot 3.1 the drivers have not been updated for this “legacy” device.
OpenCL ES Support 1.2 (full) 1.2 (full) 1.1 1.1 1.1 (should support full) Not for Android, supports CUDA Mali T7xx adds support for OpenCL 1.2 but also “full profile” just like Adreno 420 – both supporting all the desktop features of OpenCL – thus any kernels developed for desktop/mobile GPUs can run pretty much unchanged.
CU / SP Units 8 / 256 4 / 128 4 / 128 4 / 64 8 / 64 1 / 192 Mali T760 has 2x the CU of T628 but they should also be far more powerful. Adreno 420 only relies on more powerful CUs over the 330/320; nVidia uses only 1 SMX/CU but more SPs.
Global Memory (MB) 2048 of 3072 1400 of 3072 1400 of 3072 960 of 2048 1024 of 3072 n/a Modern phones with 3GB memory seem to allow about 50% to be allocated through OpenCL. Mali does generally seem to allow more, typically 66%.
Largest Memory Block (MB) 512 of 2048 347 of 1400 347 of 1400 227 of 960 694 of 1024 n/a The maximum block size seems to be about 25% of total memory, but Mali’s driver allows as much as 50%.
Constant Memory (kB) 64 64 4 4 64 n/a Mali T600 was already fine here, with Adreno 400 needed to catch up to the rest. Previously constant data would have needed to be kept in normal global memory due to the small constant memory size.
Shared Memory (kB) 32 32 8 8 32 n/a Again Mali T600 was fine already – with Adreno 400 finally matching the rest.
Max. Workgroup Size 256 x 256 x 256 1024 x 1024 x 1024 512 x 512 x 512 256 x 256 x 256 256 x 256 x 256 n/a Surprisingly the work-group size remains at 256 for Mali T700/T600 with Adreno 400 pushing alll the way to 1024. That does not necessarily mean it is the optimum size.
Cache (Reported) kB 256 128 32 32 n/a n/a Here Mali T760 overtakes them all with a 256kB L2 cache, 2x bigger than Adreno 400 and older Mali T600.
FP16 / FP64 Support Yes / Yes Yes / No Yes / No Yes / No No No Here we are the 1st mobile FP64 native GPU! If you have double floating-point workloads then stop reading now and get a SoC with Mali T700 series.
Byte/Integer Width 16 / 4 1 / 1 1 / 1 1 / 1 16 / 4 n/a Adreno prefers non-vectorised integer data even though it is VLIW5; only Mali prefers vectorised data (vec4) similar to the old ATI/AMD pre-GCN hardware. At least all our vectorisations are not in vain 😉
Float/Double Width 4 / 2 1 / n/a 1 / n/a 1 / n/a 4 / n/a n/a As before, Adreno prefers non-vectorised while Mali vectorised data. As Mali T760 supports FP64, it also wants vectorised double floating-point data.

GPGPU Compute Performance

We are testing vectorised, crypto (including hash), financial and scientific GPGPU performance of the GPUs in OpenCL.

Results Interpretation: Higher values (MPix/s, MB/s, etc.) mean better performance.

Environment: Android 5.x.x, latest updates (May 2015).

Graphics Processors ARM Mali T760 Qualcomm Adreno 420 Qualcomm Adreno 330 Qualcomm Adreno 320 ARM Mali T628 Comment
5433 GPGPU Arithmetic
GPGPU Arithmetic Benchmark Half-float/FP36 Vectorised OpenCL (Mpix/s) 199.9 184.4 73.4 20.2
GPGPU Arithmetic Benchmark Single-Float/FP32 Vectorised OpenCL (Mpix/s) 105.9 182 [+71%] 114.8 49.1 20.2 Adreno 420 manages to beat Mali T760 by a good ~70% even though we use a highly vectorised kernel – not what we’ve expected. But this is 5x faster than the old Mali T625 showing just how much Mali has improved since its last version – but not enough!
GPGPU Arithmetic Benchmark Double-float/FP64 Vectorised OpenCL (Mpix/s) 30.6 [+3x] 10.1 (emulated) 8.4 (emulated) 3.4 (emulated) 0.518 (emulated) Here you see the power of native support, Mali T760 blows everything out the water – it is 3x faster than the Adreno 400 and a crazy 60x (sixty times) faster than the old Mali T625! This is really the GPGPU to beat – nVidia must be regretting not adding FP64 to K1.
GPGPU Arithmetic Benchmark Quad-float/FP128 Vectorised OpenCL (Mpix/s) 0.995 [+5x] (emulated using FP64) 0.197 (emulated) 0.056 (emulated) 0.053 (emulated) failed Emulating FP128 using FP64 gives Mali T760 a big advantage – now it is 5x faster than Adreno 400! There is no question – if you have high precision computation to do, Mali T700 is your GPGPU.
soc_5433_gp_crypt
GPGPU Crypto Benchmark AES256 Crypto OpenCL (MB/s) 136 145 [+6%] 96 70 85 T760 is just a bit (6%) slower than Adreno 420 here, but still good improvement (2x) over its older brother T628.
GPGPU Crypto Benchmark AES128 Crypto OpenCL (MB/s) 200 131 94 89
soc_5433_gp_hash
GPGPU Crypto Benchmark SHA2-256 (int32) Hash OpenCL (MB/s) 321 [+2%] 314 141 106 89 In this integer compute-heavy workload, Mali T760 just edges Adreno 420 by 2% – pretty much a tie. Both GPGPUs are competitive in integer workloads as we’ve seen in the AES tests also.
GPGPU Crypto Benchmark SHA1 (int32) Hash OpenCL (MB/s) 948 442 271 294
soc_5433_gp_fin
GPGPU Finance Benchmark Black-Scholes FP32 OpenCL (MOPT/s) 212.9 235.4 [+10%] 170.7 85 98.3 Black-Scholes is not compute heavy allowing many GPUs to do well, and here Adreno 420 is 10% faster than Mali T760.
GPGPU Finance Benchmark Binomial FP32 OpenCL (kOPT/s) 0.842 6.605 [+7x] 4.737 1.477 0.797 Binomial is far more complex than Black-Scholes, involving many shared-memory operations (reduction) – and Adreno 420 does not disappoint; however Mali T780 (just as T628) is not very happy with our code with a pitiful score that is 1/7x (seven times slower).
GPGPU Finance Benchmark Monte-Carlo FP32 OpenCL (kOPT/s) 34 59.5 [+1.75x] 19.1 14.2 10.4 Monte-Carlo is also more complex than Black-Scholes, also involving shared memory – but read-only; Adreno 420 is 1.75x (almost two times) faster. It could be that Mali stumbles at the shared memory operations which are key to both algorithms.
soc_5433_gp_sci
GPGPU Science Benchmark SGEMM FP32 OpenCL (GFLOPS) 5.167 6.179 [+19%] 3.173 2.992 2.362 Adreno 420 continues its dominance here, being ~20% faster than Mali T760 but nowhere near the lead it had in Financial tests.
GPGPU Science Benchmark SFFT FP32 OpenCL (GFLOPS) 1.902 5.470 [+2.87x] 3.535 2.146 1.914 FFT involves a lot of memory accesses but here Adreno 420 is almost 3x faster than Mali T760, a lead similar to what we saw in the complex Financial (Binomial/Monte-Carlo) tests.
GPGPU Science Benchmark N-Body FP32 OpenCL (GFLOPS) 14.3 27.7 [+2x] 23.9 15.9 9.46 N-Body generally allows GPUs to “spread their wings” and here Adreno 420 does not disappoint – it is 2x faster than Mali T760.

It seems our early enthusiasm over FP64 native support was quickly extinguished: while Mali T760 naturally does well in FP64 tests – it cannot beat its rival Adreno (420) in other tests.

In single-precision floating-point (FP32) simple workloads, Adreno is only about 10-20% faster; however in complex workloads (Binomial, Monte-Carlo, FFT, GEMM) Adreno can be 2-7x (times) faster – a huge lead. It seems to do with shared memory accesses rather VLIW design needing highly-vectorised kernels which is what we’re using.

Naturally in double-precision floating-point (FP64) workloads, Mali T760 flies – being 3-5x (times) faster, so if those are the kinds of workloads you require – it is the natural choice. However, such precision is uncommon on phones/tablets – even desktop/laptop GPGPUs have crippled FP64 performance.

In integer workloads, the two GPGPUs are competitive with a 3-5% difference either way.

The relatively small (256) workgroup size may also hamper performance with Adreno 420 able to keep more (1024) threads in flight – although the shared cache size is the same.

GPGPU Memory Performance

We are testing memory bandwidth performance of GPUs using OpenCL, including transfer (up/down) to/from system memory; we also measure the latencies of the various memory types (global, constant, shared, etc.) using different access patterns (in-page random access, sequential access, etc.).

Results Interpretation (Bandwidth): Higher values (MPix/s, MB/s, etc.) mean better performance.

Results Interpretation (Latency): Lower values (ns, clocks, etc.) mean better performance.

Environment: Android 5.x.x, latest updates (May 2015).

Graphics Processors ARM Mali T760 Qualcomm Adreno 420 Qualcomm Adreno 330 Qualcomm Adreno 320 ARM Mali T628 Comment
Memory Configuration 3GB DDR3 (shared with CPU) 3GB DDR3 (shared with CPU) 3GB DDR3 (shared with CPU) 2GB DDR3 (shared with CPU) 3GB DDR2 (shared with CPU) Modern phones and tablets now ship with 3GB – close to the 32-bit address limit. While all SoCs suppport unified memory, neither seem to support “zero copy” or HSA which has recently made it to OpenCL on the desktop with version 2.0. Future SoCs will fix this issue and provide global virtual memory address space that CPU & GPU can share.
soc_5433_gp_mbw
GPGPU Memory Bandwidth Internal Memory Bandwidth (MB/s) 4528 9457 [+2x] 8383 4751 1436 Qualcomm’s SoC manages to extract almost 2x more bandwidth compared to Samsung’s SoC – which may expain some of the performance issues we saw when processing large amounts of data. Adreno has almost 10GB/s bandwidth to play with, similar to single-channel desktop/laptops!
GPGPU Memory Bandwidth Upload Bandwidth (MB/s) 2095 3558 [+69%] 3294 2591 601 Adreno wins again with 70% more upload bandwidth.
GPGPU Memory Bandwidth Download Bandwidth (MB/s) 2091 3689 [+76%] 2990 2412 691 Again Adreno has over 70% more download bandwidth – it is no wonder it did so well in the compute tests. Mali will have to improve markedly to match.
soc_5433_gp_mlat
GPGPU Memory Latency Global Memory Latency – In Page Random Access (ns) 199.3 [-17%] 239.6 388.2 658.8 625.8 It starts well for Mali T760, with ~20% lower response time over Adreno 420 and almost 3x faster than its old T628 brother – which no doubt helps the performance of many algorithms that access global memory randomly. All modern SoC (805, 5433, 801) show just how much improvement was made in the memory prefetchers in the last few years.
GPGPU Memory Latency Global Memory Latency – Full Random Access (ns) 346.5 [-30%] 493.2 500.2 933.7 815.2 Full random access is tough on all GPUs and here, but Mali T760 manages to be 30% faster than Adreno 420 which has not improved over 330 (same memory controller in 800 series).
GPGPU Memory Latency Global Memory Latency – Sequential Access (ns) 147.2 106.6 [-27%] 98.2 116.2 280.6 With sequential accesses – we finally see Adreno 420 (but also the older 300 series) show their prowess being 27% faster. Qualcomm’s memory prefetchers seem to be doing their job here.
GPGPU Memory Latency Constant Memory (ns) 263.1 70.7 [-1/3.75x] 74.5 103 343 Here Adreno 420’s constant memory has almost 4x lower latency than Mali (thus 1/4 response time) – which may be a clue as to why it is so much faster. Basically it does not seem that constant memory is cached on the Mali but just normal global memory.
GPGPU Memory Latency Shared Memory (ns) 301 30.1 [-1/10x] 47 83 329 Shared memory even more important as it is used to share data between threads – lack of it reduces the work-group sizes that can be used. Here we see Adreno 420’s shared memory having 10x lower latency than Mali (thus 1/10x response time) – no wonder Mali T760 is so much slower in complex workloads that make extensive use of shared memory. Basically shared memory is not *dedicated* but just normal global memory.

Memory testing seems to reveal Mali’s T760 problem: its bandwidth is much lower than Adreno while its key memories (shared, constant) latencies are far higher. It is a wonder how it performs so well actually if the numbers are to be believed – but since Mali T628 scores similarly there is no reason to doubt them.

Adreno T420 has 2x higher internal bandwidth and over 70% more upload/download bandwidth – and since neither supports HSA and thus “zero copy” – it will be much faster the bigger the memory blocks used. Here, Qualcomm’s completely-designed SoC (CPU, GPU, memory controller) pays dividends.

Mali T760’s global memory latency is lower but neither constant nor (more crucially) shared memory seem to be treated differently and thus have similar latencies to global memory; common GPGPU optimisations are thus useless and any commplex algorithm making extensive use of shared memory will be greatly bogged down. ARM should better re-think their approach for the new (T800) Mali series.

Video Shader Performance

We are testing vectorised shader compute performance of the GPUs in OpenGL.

Results Interpretation: Higher values (MPix/s, MB/s, etc.) mean better performance.

Environment: Android 5.x.x, latest updates (May 2015).

Graphics Processors ARM Mali T760 Qualcomm Adreno 420 Qualcomm Adreno 330 Qualcomm Adreno 320 ARM Mali T628 nVidia K1 Comment
soc_5433_gp_vid_aa
Video Shader Benchmark Single-Float/FP32 OpenGL ES (Mpix/s) 49 170.5 [+3.5x%] 114.4 60 33.6 124.7 Finally the K1 can play and does very well but cannot overtake Adreno 420 which also blows the Mali T760 out of the water being over 3.5x faster. We can see just how much shader performance has improved in a few years.
Video Shader Benchmark Half-float/FP16 OpenGL ES (Mpix/s) 54 219.6 [+4x] 115 107.6 32.2 124.4 While Mali T760 finally supports FP16, it does not seem to do much good over FP32 (+10% faster) while Adreno 420 benefits greatly – thus increases its lead to being 4x faster. OpenGL is still not Mali’s forte.
Video Shader Benchmark Double-float/FP64 OpenGL ES (Mpix/s) 2.3 [1/21x] (emulated) 10.6 [+5x] [1/17x] (emulated) 9.4 [1/12x] (emulated) 4.0 [1/15x] (emulated) 2.1 [1/16x] (emulated) 26.0 [1/4.8x] (emulated) While Mali T760 does support FP64, the OpenGL extension is not yet supported/enabled – thus it is forced to run it emulated in FP32. This allows Adreno 420 to be 5x faster – though nVidia’s K1 takes the win.
Video Shader Benchmark Quad-float/FP128 OpenGLES (Mpix/s) n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a Emulating FP128 using FP32 is too much for our GPUs, we shall have to wait for the new generation of mobile GPUs.

Using OpenGL ES allows the K1 to play, but more specifically it shows Mali’s OpenGL prowess is lacking – Adreno 420 is between 4-5x faster – a big difference. FP16 support seems to make no difference while FP64 support is missing in OpenGL thus it cannot play its Ace card. ARM has some OpenGL driver optimisation to make.

SiSoftware Official Ranker Scores

Final Thoughts / Conclusions

Mali T760 is a big upgrade over its older T600 series though a lot of the details have not changed. However, it is not enough to beat its rival Adreno 400 series – with native FP64 performance (and thus FP128 emulated) being the only shining example. While its integer workload performance is competitive – floating-point performance in complex workloads (making extensive use of shared memory) is much lower. Even highly vectorised kernels that should help its VLIW design cannot close the gap.

It seems the SoC’s memory controller lets it down, and its non-dedicated shared and constant memory means high latencies slow it down. ARM should really implement dedicated shared memory in the next major version.

Elsewhere its OpenGL shader compute performance is even slower (1/4x Adreno) with FP16 support not helping much and FP64 native support missing. This is a surprise considering its far more competive OpenCL performance. Hopefully future drivers will address this – but considering the T600 performance has remained pretty much unchanged we’re not hopeful.

To see how the Exynos 5433 CPU fares, please see Exynos 5433 CPU (Cortex A57+A53) performance article!

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