When looking for an affordable Android TV box, budget smartphone, or smart home display in 2026, you will often find two graphics processing units (GPUs) dominating the low-cost market: the and the older ARM Mali-450 (often MP4 or MP5) .
To understand why these two chips perform so differently, we must look at the underlying technology shifts between their production timelines. Mali-450 Product Support - Arm Developer
The Mali-450 uses scalar execution units. To match the performance of modern GPUs, it requires many cores (MP4, MP6, MP8). More cores physically active means more silicon area wasted as heat. An 8-core Mali-450 can easily draw under load, which in a cheap plastic phone with no heat pipe feels like a hot coal. malig31 mp2 vs mali450 hot
It is usually manufactured on older, less efficient 28nm processes, which consume more power and generate more waste heat for the same performance.
Released over a decade ago, the Mali-450 operates on the legacy . Utgard utilizes a split-pipeline mechanism, meaning it features dedicated vertex processors and separate fragment processors. Because these pipelines cannot share workloads dynamically, the GPU often leaves core components idle while overloading others, resulting in high heat generation and inefficient energy consumption. The Mali-G31 MP2 Bifrost Architecture When looking for an affordable Android TV box,
A common concern in budget devices is overheating. When comparing the two, thermal behavior is heavily linked to the manufacturing process node. Mali-G31 MP2 Thermal Profile
Real-world synthetic benchmarks show a close race. In 3DMark Ice Storm, the Mali-G31 MP2 can score up to , a strong result for an entry-level GPU. Older Utgard GPUs in the same benchmark achieve up to 6,668 marks. This suggests the modern Bifrost architecture allows the G31 to punch above its weight, even with lower theoretical numbers. The Mali-450 MP's PassMark score is approximately 5,773, indicating it still holds its own. To match the performance of modern GPUs, it
The Mali-450 MP4 is the problem child. It belongs in a museum or a cheap 2015 tablet that doubles as a hand warmer.
The Mali-G31 MP2 is a mid-range GPU released by ARM in 2018. It features:
As you can see, the Mali-G31 MP2 outperforms the Mali-450 MP4 in all three benchmarks, with a significant lead in the more demanding GFXBench 5.0 tests. This is due to the Mali-G31 MP2's more modern architecture and higher clock speeds.