Falanx Mali 100 IP Core is First Handheld 3D Hardware Acceleration Certified by Futuremark Smartphone Benchmark

Futuremark's SPMark04 benchmark product is a growing presence in today's handheld market with over 30,000 copies distributed. The benchmark provides a comprehensive application for measuring and comparing the performance and power consumption of increasingly complex mobile platforms, enabling objective comparisons among various smartphones based on Symbian OS.

"Handheld platforms present their own distinctive challenges and requirements, and Futuremark is the first to create a benchmark that accurately measures how well a product meets those challenges and requirements," said Borgar Ljosland, president and CEO of Falanx. "As for Falanx, we're very excited to have independent confirmation of what our engineers have known all along -- that Mali IP cores offer the industry's best multimedia performance with minimal power consumption."

"With the projected growth in Multimedia IP-driven phones, it's important to have an accurate benchmark for handheld 3D hardware acceleration performance so that manufacturers, businesses and consumers can make informed choices," said Tero Sarkkinen, executive vice president of sales and marketing for Futuremark. "We welcome the participation of Falanx as the first vendor of handheld 3D hardware accelerators to achieve certification on the SPMark04 benchmark's game test, and we encourage other IP vendors to put their own technology to the test." More information about the benchmark and certified results are at: http://www.futuremark.com/bdp/certified/ .

Rigorous, comprehensive testing for real-world smartphone demands

The SPMark04 benchmark offers an extensive variety of tests, such as an advanced 3D gaming scene and theoretical tests for 3D performance measurement. The 2D section features 2D content display and image manipulation tests. System tests in SPMark04 represent the real usage of a smartphone, e.g. adding entries to calendar and looking up contacts. Symbian OS is the global industry standard operating system for smartphones, and is licensed to the world's leading handset manufacturers, which account for over 85 percent of annual worldwide mobile phone sales.

Until now, end users have paid little attention to hardware performance on mobile devices such as smartphones. However, with increasing integration of 2D, 3D and video into handheld devices, hardware performance will likely take on more significance in buying decisions. This creates the need for a handheld benchmark, both for end users and for manufacturers who are deciding which components to include in their products.

Mali IP Core Technology

Falanx has employed a patent-pending rendering architecture that takes the best of tile-based and immediate mode rendering, which processes 2D, 3D and video within a single core. The architecture is optimized for high memory latency ARM-based SoCs, with a reduced gate count, improved memory bandwidth and ultimately slashing production costs in half compared to that of other IP and dedicated silicon solutions. Additionally, the company provides a complete out of the box software stack that is pre-verified to support, e.g. OpenGL® ES and Microsoft® Direct3D® Mobile, together with a performance analysis tool, for even quicker time to market and improved decision qualities for SoC integrators.

The Mali Pixel Processors

The new generation of 2D, 3D and video rasterizer cores, the Mali110 and Mali55, are single pipeline 2D/3D/Video IP rasterizer cores that deliver 30fps encode and decode of video, the only advanced 16X Full Scene Anti-Aliasing (FSAA) support and texture filtering for increased bandwidth savings for high-performance multimedia devices. The Mali55 is a die shrink of the Mali110, allowing for advanced multimedia capabilities for the value market. Since both use only standard interfaces and retain binary compatibility for software, the Mali110 and Mali55 do not require any modifications to the SoC environment, thereby making the solution scalable for different custom applications.

MaliGP -- Geometry Processing

Used as an additional processor to either the Mali110 or Mali55, the MaliGP (geometry processor) delivers integer, floating-point and 3D graphics in a high performance media processor hardware IP core and supports all functionality specified in the OpenGL standards. This integrated geometry processor performs complex transform and lighting, while offloading the main CPU in the handheld and enables rich 3D applications to run extremely fast while consuming minimal power.

About Falanx Microsystems ( www.falanx.com )

Falanx Microsystems develops graphics accelerator IP cores, marketed to semiconductor system-on-chip (SoC) vendors, that deliver high quality multimedia images without compromising performance, power consumption and system cost. Unlike most graphics IP cores, Falanx's Mali Graphics Core-designed from the ground-up for mobile applications such as cell phones, PDAs and portable game platforms-is the only graphics IP core offering a complete integration of 2D, 3D and video, plus software and interoperability drivers, in an all-in-one solution. Falanx is headquartered in Trondheim, Norway, and is privately-held.

About Futuremark Corporation (www.futuremark.com)

Futuremark® Corporation is the leading provider of computer performance analysis software and services. Futuremark is known around the world for its benchmark products, including the 3DMark® and PCMark® series and SPMark(TM) (with more than 30 million copies distributed worldwide) and value-added services powered by a database of over 11 million real life benchmarking results. Futuremark maintains offices in Saratoga, California and Helsinki, Finland.