Although neither company will officially announce the fact, PocketGamer.biz has confirmed that Samsung's very thin (8.5mm) Galaxy S II is the first phone to ship with ARM's current top-of-the-range Mali 400 GPU.

Mali is ARM's attempt to muscle into the GPU market dominated by Imagination Technologies, as well as other competitors such as Qualcomm's Adreno and Nvidia's Tegra 2.

Significantly, in the case of the Galaxy S II, the Mali is deployed in a quad-core configuration, providing for maximum performance.

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As for Samsung, all it will say is that the device - "clocked at lightning speed (aka 1 GHz)" - has a dual core CPU and a quad core GPU, which combined can process 3.2 billion pixels per second.

Further marketing speak rates its 3D graphics performance as being "five times faster than single core processors".

Such descriptions aside though, getting its new silicon design into high profile hardware such as the Galaxy S II is clearly good news from ARM, especially as the original Galaxy S used UK rival Imagination Technologies' PowerVR GPU design.