ARM have announced a new GPU design that is set to be baked into devices later this year, with the company promising 50% more graphics performance, all within the same area, with less power draw compared to current offerings.

Second-generation Mali T600 GPUs, comprised of the Mali T624, the Mali T628 and the Mali T678, provide "optimal performance and energy efficiency for different end devices," says ARM. The new GPU designs are set to include up to 8 cores, which should provide better frame rates than current chips, as well as improved compute performance. ARM is also including a small area of silicon that is devoted to new graphics compression code, which the company have named Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression (ASTC) and provided as an open standard.

At the moment, developers have to choose between codecs in order to get the right level of texture compression for different platforms, but ARM are hoping to wipe this issue away and make it easier for developers to create content that can be used across multiple platforms.