A Dual-Shader 3-D Graphics Processor With Fast 4-D Vector Inner Product Units and Power-Aware Texture Cache

Abstract

This paper presents a fully programmable 3-D graphics processor using unified shaders for mobile environment. In the system level, we adopted dual-core, dual-issue VLIW, and multithreading methods to utilize instruction, data, and task level parallelism in the graphics applications. In the shader core level, a novel IEEE-754 compliant 4-D vector inner product arithmetic unit and a configurable texture cache are proposed. Using these methods, the proposed processor achieves 143 Mvertices/s and 2.3 Gtexels/s consuming the power of 367 mW. The evaluation shows significant performance and power-delay product benefits. For real graphics applications, test results indicate 2.07 times improvement in performance and 34% reduction in power-delay product compared to previous mobile 3-D graphics processors. The proposed 3-D graphics processor is implemented in 4.5 x 4.5 mm using 0.18-mu m CMOS technology.