ARM Mali-T880 reserved for high-end SoCs

However, the Mali-T880 won’t be a direct successor to the current Mali-T760, which is used in a number of Samsung and MediaTek SoCs. 

The Mali-T860 should take care of this market, and ARM says the GPU is designed for “best performance for lowest energy consumption”. Tom’s Hardware speculates that the Mali-T860 will debut in devices like the Galaxy Note 5, with the Mali-T880 arriving later, possibly in the next generation Exynos, used in the Galaxy S7. 

Both the Mali-T860 and Mali-T880 are expected to appear on next generation ARM-designs, which are coming next year, on FinFET nodes in 14nm and 16nm. These chips are expected to sport big Cortex-A72 cores, in some cases backed by frugal Cortex-A53 cores in a big.LITTLE configuration.

Mali-T830 and Mali-T820 go after the low end

The Mali-T830 and Mali-T820 are designed for lower-end devices. Both are designed to offer as much performance as possible from a “minimal silicon area,” but the Mali-T820 should be the slower and more efficient of the two.

There is still not a lot of info on the Mali-T830 and Mali-T820, but we expect to see them on cheap and small quad-core Cortex-A53 SoCs.

As for the top end Mali-T880, OEMs will be free to use up to 16 cores, twice as many as on the Mali-T760. We still do not know if the Mali-T820 and Mali-T830 are as configurable as their bigger siblings, but it’s likely that they are.