We've been talking a lot about ARM lately, and why not? It's the company behind the world's most popular 32-bit processor. ARM-based chips outnumber even Intel's better-known x86 processors, and by a wide margin.

But do you know about Mali?

You know, Mali. That French-speaking country in northwest Africa. The one just south of Algeria and north of Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, and Guinea. It is perhaps fitting that a country encompassing part of the Sahara desert should lend its name to a semiconductor.

In ARM's world, Mali isn’t a big country but a small graphics processor. Like ARM's ubiquitous RISC processors, Mali is licensed to hardware designers as synthesizable IP. In other words, it's a soft GPU core, intended to be incorporated into an SoC alongside one or more ARM processors.