Low Power Graphics Processing Units with Programmable Texture Unit and Universal Rasterizer for Mobile Multimedia Applications
Date Issued
2008
Date
2008
Author(s)
Sun, Chih-Hao
Abstract
In the current graphics pipeline, programmable vertex, pixel, and geometry shaders provide programmers with increased flexibility for different rendering applications.rogrammable graphics processing unit (GPUs) support not only highquality rendering algorithms but also a large number of general-purpose computations that are mapped into the graphics hardware; such computations are called as general-purpose computations on GPUs (GPGPU). This concept is beneficial, particularly for mobile systems. Owing to the development of advanced GPGPU techniques, we can establish a unified mobile multimedia subsystem by processing different types of contents on GPUs; this can reduce the cost of the entire system because of high hardware utilization and efficiency. However, a mobileevice is by definition powered with batteries and is also small in order to be portable. It is important to make sure that the system of the mobile phone uses as little energy as possible. In this thesis, we presented three units adaptable for mobilenGPUs; there are Universal Rasterizer, Programmable Filtering Unit (PFU), and High-Quality Mipmapping Texture Compression with Alpha Map (MTC).irst, an Universal Rasterizer in tile-scan triangle traversal with edge equations for low complexity is purposed. The related efficient tiled triangle traversallgorithm is also introduced. The result shows it can minimize the processing time of triangle traversal, and ensure no reiteration when traverse. Besides, the improved hardware architecture realize the efficiency of the traversal and rasterization algorithm. With highly hardware-sharing and the digital signal processing techniques as pipelined and scheduling, it can achieve real-time requirement for graphics application.econd, Programmable Filtering Unit (PFU), which is a newly developed programmable unit formedia-processing application, implemented on the streamprocessing architecture of GPUs. The PFU is located in the texture unit of a GPU, and it can efficiently execute several types of filtering operations by directly accessing the multi-bank texture cache and specially-designed data-paths. Simulation results show that in comparison to conventional texture units, the processing time required in H.264/AVC motion compensation and video segmentation can be reduced by 28.4% and 60%, respectively, by using the PFU.urthermore, we presents a high-quality mipmapping texture compression (MTC) system with alpha map. With our approach, it can reduce 80% to 90% of texture access memory traffic. By inspecting the similarity between alpha channel and luminance channel, the two channels are efficiently encoded together with linear prediction in Differential mode. Besides, Spilt mode may take care of textures which have no strong relationship between alpha channel and luminance channel. Furthermore, a layer overlapping technique is proposed as well to reduce the texture memory bandwidth of MTC. Simulation results on graphics platform show that MTC can provide high image quality, low bandwidth and less cache miss rate for textures.ntegrated with the three purposed units mentioned above, low power graphics processing units for mobile multimedia applications is implemented in this thesis. The prototype chip is fabricated by UMC 90nm technology, and the chip size is 5?5mm2. The designed working frequency is 200MHz, and the worst case power consumption is 26mW. The processing capability of the chip is 200 Mvertices/sf geometry transform and 400 Mpixels/s and 1.6 Gtexels/s of texture filtering, or 11 GFLOPs with PFU.
Subjects
Graphics Hardware
Grphics Processing Units
Type
thesis
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