Task Scheduler and Resource Scheduler on Multi-Core GPUs for Mobile Devices

Recently, the multimedia application in consumer electronics has become more
and more prosperous. Among all, the smart phones are not just phones. There
are many multimedia applications such as games, camera, video, internet, GPS,
MP3 etc embedded into the smart phones. Usually, there is a 3D graphics processing
unit (GPU) which is embedded into mobile devices to enhance the processing
capability of the multimedia applications. Since screen is the most important interface
between the users and mobile devices, the high resolution and high quality
screens are indispensible for users that use the mobile devices. However, higher
resolution screen and higher quality display both mean that the processing power
of the GPU must be increased which means the number of processing cores must
be increased. This is a challenge since there are many limitations on mobile devices.
How to maximize the utilization of the multi-core processor and how to
make the efficient usage of the resource for processing will be a design challenge.
In this thesis, we proposed a multi-core mobile GPU for mobile devices. We
propose a dynamic task scheduler to dynamically assign the subtask to each processor
to make the whole system more load balance; besides, we also propose a
resource scheduler to efficiently prefetch the resource that is required by processor
to make the whole processing pipeline more efficient.
Based on the above techniques, we extend our original two processing shader
cores GPU to a eight core unified shader GPU with task scheduler and resource
scheduler added. We also realize these to a SOC platform, our chip is fabricated
by TSMC 65nm technology. The chip area is 4mmx4mm and the chip working frequency is at 200 MHz. The maximum power consumption is 210mW. The
maximum processing capabilities is 800MVtx/sec and 1600MPxl/sec.