Design of a fully programmable shader processor for low power mobile devices

In this paper, we propose a novel architecture of a general graphics shader processor without a dedicated hardware. Recently, mobile devices require the high performance graphics processor as well as the small size and low power. The proposed shader processor is a GP-GPU (General-Purpose computing on Graphics Processing Units) to execute the whole OpenGL ES 2.0 graphics pipeline by using shader instructions. It does not require the separate dedicate H/W such as rasterization on this fully programmable capability. The fully programmable 3D graphics shader processor can reduce much of the graphics hardware. The chip size of the designed shader processor is reduced less than 60% in comparison with previous processors.