Title :
Homogeneous Stream Processors With Embedded Special Function Units for High-Utilization Programmable Shaders
Author :
Kim, Young-Jun ; Kim, Hyo-Eun ; Kim, Seok-Hoon ; Park, Jun-Seok ; Paek, Seungwook ; Kim, Lee-Sup
Author_Institution :
Sch. of Electr. Eng. & Comput. Sci., Korea Adv. Inst. of Sci. & Technol. (KAIST), Daejeon, South Korea
Abstract :
We embed special function units (SFUs) in homogeneous stream processors (SPs) within a graphics processing unit (GPU), to improve its performance in running modern programmable shaders, which make poor use of a single-instruction multiple-data (SIMD) architecture. We also compact instructions, so as to reduce the size of the instruction memory, and reduce area requirements by using a partial SFU in SPs, and a lookup table which is shared between multiple SFUs. The result is an increase of 88% in utilization and a reduction in the normalized area-delay product of 27%, compared to a baseline SIMD architecture. We verified our architecture on an field-programmable gate-array evaluation platform with an ARM9 host processor and a full 3-D graphics pipeline.
Keywords :
embedded systems; field programmable gate arrays; graphics processing units; instruction sets; multiprocessing systems; parallel architectures; performance evaluation; table lookup; 3D graphics pipeline; ARM9 host processor; GPU; SIMD architecture; embedded special function units; field programmable gate array evaluation platform; graphics processing unit; high-utilization programmable shaders; homogeneous stream processors; instruction memory; lookup table; normalized area-delay product; partial SFU; single-instruction multiple-data architecture; Graphics; Graphics processing unit; Resource management; Table lookup; VLIW; 3-D graphics; graphics processing unit (GPU); mobile device; programmable shader; special function unit (SFU); stream processor (SP);
Journal_Title :
Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems, IEEE Transactions on
DOI :
10.1109/TVLSI.2011.2161499
