This is a block diagram of Arm's  Mali-400 MP multicore graphics processing unit, unveiled today, showing the shared level 2 cache, the "console class" vertex processor, and the maximum four fragment processors able to fill a billion pixels a second.

Arm sells designs and does not make chips to actual implementations, and thus performance and power drain, are down the manufacturer. Chris Porthouse, senior product manager, said some Arm customers would implement it at 45nm scale and some were looking at 32nm.

There is much interest in how Arm is going to play against Intel's new Atom processors on price and performance. Apple's iPhone and iThouch have shown what can be done with Arm technology, but Mali-400 designs won't hit the market until 2010. Products using its single-core Mali-200 are expected to appear this year.