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Arm announced the Mali-G78 on May 26, 2020, as a second-generation Valhall mobile GPU with configurations of up to 24 shader cores—eight more than the Mali-G77’s 16-core ceiling. The number describes a licensable GPU design option, not a 24-core phone chip or a retail graphics card. Actual performance depended on each licensee’s core count, clock speed, memory system, process technology, drivers and thermal limits.
The announcement in brief
Arm introduced Mali-G78 alongside the Cortex-A78 CPU, the Cortex-X Custom program and Cortex-X1, the sub-premium Mali-G68 GPU, and the Ethos-N78 machine-learning processor. The announcement was an IP launch: Arm designs processor blocks and licenses them to semiconductor companies, which integrate selected configurations into system-on-chip (SoC) products.
Arm positioned Mali-G78 for high-fidelity mobile games and experiences approaching console or PC-style rendering. The contemporaneous announcement claimed up to a 25% graphics-performance increase over Mali-G77. That was Arm’s IP-generation comparison, not an independent result for every phone using the GPU.
Arm’s May 26, 2020 announcement contains the launch details.
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What “up to 24 cores” means
Shader cores, not CPU cores
The 24 units are Mali-G78 shader cores: parallel GPU execution resources used for graphics workloads. They are not general-purpose CPU cores such as Cortex-A78 or Cortex-A55 cores. A notation such as Mali-G78 MP24 conventionally indicates a 24-core implementation; MP10 would indicate 10 shader cores.
A scalable maximum, not a default specification
Arm offered Mali-G78 configurations up to 24 shader cores. Chip designers could license and implement a smaller configuration to meet die-area, power, cost or product-segmentation goals. Therefore, saying that a phone “has a 24-core Mali-G78” requires documentation for that specific SoC; the launch headline alone does not establish it.
The preceding Mali-G77 supported up to 16 cores. Moving the ceiling to 24 expanded throughput potential, but 50% more possible cores does not imply 50% more game performance. Clocks, memory bandwidth, architecture, software and sustained thermals all affect results.
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What changed in the Valhall generation
Mali-G78 retained Arm’s Valhall architecture while adding changes intended to improve utilization and efficiency:
- Asynchronous Top Level: a more flexible way to manage work across the GPU’s top-level structure, helping keep available shader resources busy. It is not an extra shader core and will not benefit every workload equally.
- Tiler improvements: refinements to the stage that organizes geometry and rendering work for mobile tile-based graphics.
- Improved fragment-dependency tracking: better handling of relationships between fragment operations can reduce avoidable stalls.
- FMA-related efficiency improvements: Arm lists additional efficiency features around fused multiply-add operations on its product information.
- Arm Frame Buffer Compression (AFBC): compression across Arm’s Mali multimedia range can reduce memory traffic and the associated power pressure when the workload and implementation support it.
These features matter because a GPU’s useful output is constrained by more than arithmetic units. Feeding cores with data, scheduling work and moving frame buffers efficiently can be as important as increasing the core count.
Arm’s current product description lists the Mali-G78 feature set and Valhall positioning.
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How to read Arm’s performance numbers
| Arm figure | What it measures or describes | How to interpret it |
|---|---|---|
| Up to 24 shader cores | Maximum scalable configuration | Not a specification shared by every Mali-G78 device |
| Up to 25% graphics-performance increase | Arm’s launch comparison with Mali-G77 | A vendor claim; the announcement does not provide a universal phone benchmark setup |
| 15% performance-density improvement | Arm’s separate gaming-content performance-per-area metric | Not the same as saying total device frame rate is 15% higher |
| Improved efficiency and battery life | Design goals and Arm claims | Results vary with process node, clocks, memory, software, cooling and power policy |
The 25% and 15% figures are not contradictory. They refer to different metrics. The 25% statement is a graphics-performance claim in the launch announcement; the technical blog’s 15% figure concerns performance density for gaming content. Neither should be presented as an independently measured, universal result. The supplied Arm material does not provide one standardized test table specifying device, game, resolution, API, driver, clock and thermal conditions.
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Mali-G68: the related sub-premium tier
Arm announced Mali-G68 at the same time as Mali-G78. It brought the newer feature lineage to a sub-premium segment and supported up to six shader cores, compared with Mali-G78’s maximum of 24. It was a separate product tier, not a Mali-G78 design with “defective” cores.
This segmentation let SoC vendors choose a GPU family and scale appropriate to a device’s cost, power and performance target.
From licensable IP to smartphone silicon
Mali-G78 reached commercial smartphone SoCs. Samsung’s Exynos 2100, announced as a 5 nm SoC, used a Mali-G78 alongside Cortex-X1, Cortex-A78 and Cortex-A55 CPU cores. Samsung claimed more than a 40% graphics improvement over its predecessor for that SoC.
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See Arm’s Exynos 2100 announcement for the downstream example.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What the GPU meant for developers
Arm’s target was sustained, high-quality mobile graphics, including machine-learning-assisted game features such as voice or object recognition. Arm also promoted Performance Advisor and related tools for finding bottlenecks and observing performance during development.
There is no single universal “Mali-G78 driver” behavior across phones. Developers still need to profile the exact target device and account for:
- the SoC’s GPU core configuration and clock policy;
- graphics API and driver implementation;
- engine scheduling, shader complexity and asset formats;
- memory bandwidth, display resolution and render scale;
- power-management settings and sustained thermal throttling.
A title optimized for one Mali-G78 implementation can therefore behave differently on another, even when both use the same GPU family.
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Why core count alone is a poor performance proxy
More shader cores can raise peak parallel throughput, but only when the rest of the SoC can keep them supplied and the workload can use them. A device with fewer cores may outperform one with more if it has higher clocks, faster memory, a newer process, better cooling or more effective drivers. Resolution also changes the bottleneck: a memory-bound workload will not necessarily scale with additional arithmetic resources.
Meaningful benchmark comparisons should name the exact SoC and phone, GPU configuration, driver version, game or test version, resolution, graphics API and power mode. Without those details, a “Mali-G78” label identifies a family, not a fixed performance level.
Consumer Mali-G78 versus Mali-G78AE
Arm later introduced Mali-G78AE for automotive and other safety-oriented systems. It scaled from one to 24 shader cores but added functional-safety features and flexible partitioning for those environments. Mali-G78AE is a related safety-capable product, not interchangeable with the consumer mobile Mali-G78 specification.
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Arm describes the automotive context in its safety-capable computing announcement and the Mali-G78AE certification note.
Bottom line
Mali-G78 was a meaningful expansion of Arm’s Valhall mobile GPU family: the licensable design raised the maximum from 16 Mali-G77 shader cores to 24 and added scheduling, tiling, dependency-tracking and efficiency improvements. “24 cores” was a ceiling that chipmakers could choose, not a promise that every phone used the maximum or delivered proportional speed. Arm’s 25% graphics claim and 15% performance-density claim describe different, vendor-supplied metrics, while real-world results came from each SoC’s implementation, software and thermal envelope.
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