Tile-based GPU optimizations through ESL full system simulation

We present a tile-based GPU design which is modeled in a full system simulation platform. The full system simulation platform includes a functional Linux-based system on which the GPU is incorporated for design explorations. To accurately estimate the execution time of the application graphics software, an execution time synchronization mechanism for the virtual platform is developed. We extend the Ericsson Texture Compression (ETC) scheme in our GPU to support alpha compression. In this way, we are able to reduce the external memory accesses to about one sixth, and speed up the rasterization engine (RE) by 35%. We also optimize the hardware-and-software data flow through the full system design platform and obtain significant improvements.