Glossary

Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression (ASTC): Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression, a flexible lossy compression format that is widely used in mobile devices.
Arm Fixed-Rate Compression (AFRC): Arm Fixed-Rate Compression, a lossy framebuffer compression format supported by Arm GPUs.
Arm FrameBuffer Compression (AFBC): Arm FrameBuffer Compression, a lossless framebuffer compression format supported by Arm GPUs.
Bubble: Bubbles are short periods of idle time in a hardware or software pipeline, reducing the performance of the running operation.
Command Stream Frontend (CSF): Command Stream Frontend, the interface between the Mali driver and the GPU hardware.
Deferred Vertex Shading (DVS): Deferred Vertex Shading, a geometry pipeline optimization introduced in Arm 5th Generation GPUs to reduce intermediate geometry bandwidth between phases of a render pass.
Display Processing Unit (DPU): Display Processing Unit, a real-time processor used to compose the final on-screen image, and then send it to the display.
Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS): Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling, adaptive power management used to adjust device performance to meet the demands of the running workloads.
Floating point operation (FLOP): Floating point operation, a unit of data processing capacity.
Floating point operations (FLOPs): Floating point operations, a unit of data processing capacity.
Floating point operations per second (FLOP/s): Floating point operations per second, a unit of data processing throughput.
FP16: A 16-bit floating point operation.
FP32: A 32-bit floating point operation.
Fused Multiply Accumulate (FMA): Fused Multiply Accumulate, a three input arithmetic operation combining a multiply and an add.
General Purpose GPU (GPGPU): General Purpose GPU, use of a GPU for non-graphical use cases.
High Dynamic Range (HDR): High Dynamic Range, a color encoding that represents a wider range of light intensities, allowing more realistic highlights and shadows.
Immediate Mode Renderer (IMR): Immediate Mode Renderer, a GPU rendering pipeline that processes primitives and fragments in application draw-order.
Low Dynamic Range (LDR): Low Dynamic Range, a color encoding that represents limited range of light intensities that can be displayed on a traditional computer screen.
Min-spec: The minimum specification device that an application is aiming to support.
Multi-Sample Anti-Aliasing (MSAA): Multi-Sample Anti-Aliasing, a hardware-accelerated screen-space anti-aliasing technique using multiple sub-samples per pixel.
Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD): Single Instruction Multiple Data, a programming model commonly used in CPUs that uses vector hardware by issuing instructions that operate on vectors of data.
Single Instruction Multiple Thread (SIMT): Single Instruction Multiple Thread, a programming model commonly used in GPUs that uses vector hardware by issuing scale instructions that operate on scalar data for multiple threads.
System on a Chip (SoC): System on a Chip, an integrated computer on a single silicon logic die, often tightly coupled with an in-package DRAM die.
System-Level Cache (SLC): System-Level Cache, a large cache that sits between the DRAM controller and the processors in the system.
Tile-Based Renderer (TBR): Tile-Based Renderer, a GPU rendering pipeline that processes primitives in application draw-order, but processes fragments as a sequence of screen-space tiles.