ST-Ericsson and ARM to accelerate innovation in mobile user experience

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND & CAMBRIDGE, ENGLAND: ST-Ericsson and ARM announced a co-operation to accelerate the next step in mobile user experience and graphics innovation with the creation of a Mali technology-enabled development platform for content and application developers, available via the ARM Mali Developer Center.

The cooperation will speed up bringing consumers a better gaming experience in terms of high quality graphics, video and audio on their mobile devices. At the same time it will improve the user interface with enhanced performance, quicker responses and the ability to implement 3D graphics. The availability of the platform will enable developers to reduce significantly the time-to-market of content and applications for next generation devices.

The ARM Mali Developer Center (www.malideveloper.com) fosters a growing developer community of software engineers by providing resources such as graphics software development tools, example code, documentation and access to upcoming hardware through a community-based Web portal.

“ARM has welcomed the opportunity to launch this joint initiative with ST-Ericsson. The availability of this development platform will help achieve and accelerate the Mali vision of outstanding graphics in any consumer electronic device,” said Lance Howarth, general manager, ARM Media Processing Division.

“By using the platform, members of the Mali Developer Center will be able to access Mali GPU capabilities early and create outstanding content and applications for the next generation of consumer devices.”

“Advanced graphics play a key role in the user experience for a wide variety of portable and consumer devices. Our collaboration with ARM will bring the Mali GPU capabilities to the developer community,” said Marc Cetto, vice president, 3G Multimedia and Platforms Division, ST-Ericsson. “With this co-operation we foresee that our customers will benefit from the early availability of a broad range of innovative content for their devices.”

To provide access to a leading edge environment, the development board is powered by ST-Ericsson’s U8500, the first smartphone platform to integrate the ARM Mali-400 OpenGL ES2.0 and OpenVG1.1 graphics processing unit. The U8500 is one of the earliest mobile platforms to introduce an ARM Cortex™-A9 MPCore™ SMP dual core processor and can support HD video playback at 1080p.