An Energy-Efficient Unified Register File for Mobile GPUs
Slo‐Li Chu, Chih-Chieh Hsiao, Chiu-Cheng Hsieh · 2011
The programmability of mobile GPUs have raised in recently years, where the shaders inside are instructed by shading programs for realistic 3D effects. The register files for a conventional high throughput multithreaded shader consumes 10% to 20% energy of it. However the register usages of shading program are quite low. In order to reduce the dynamic energy for register file in a multithreaded mobile shader, this paper proposed an unified register file design to reduce both dynamic and leakage energy of it. The result shows that proposed design reduces 85% of dynamic energy in a multithreaded register file. Furthermore, the proposed design reduces 59% of leakage energy and 25% of area with negligible performance degradation. Also, the energy savings in proposed designs are at least 75% more than related work.