Texture Filter Memory – A Power-efficient and Scalable Texture Memory Architecture for Mobile Graphics Processors
B. V. N. Silpa, Anjul Patney, Tushar Krishna, Preeti Ranjan P, G. S. Visweswaran · 2010
capabilitiesinmobilesystems,energyconsumptionofgraphics hardware is becoming a major design concern in addition to the traditional performance enhancement criteria. Among the different steps in the graphics processing pipeline, we have observed that memory accesses during texture mapping – a highly memory intensive phase – contribute 30-40 % of the energyconsumedintypicalembeddedgraphicsprocessors.This makesthetexturemappingsubsystemanattractivecandidatefor energyoptimization.Wearguethatastandardcachehierarchy, commonly used by researchers and commercial graphics processorsfortexturemapping,iswastefulofenergy,andpropose theTextureFilterMemory,anenergyefficientarchitecturethat exploitslocalityandtherelativelyhighdegreeofpredictability intexturememoryaccesspatterns.Ourarchitectureconsumes 75 % lesser energy for texturing in a fixed function pipeline, incurringnoperformanceoverheadandasmallareaoverhead overconventionaltexturemappinghardware. I.