A Multi-thread Unified Shader with Variable Precision Modes

• Main Authors: Jhen-Fong Yang, 楊政峰
• Other Authors: Shiann-Rong Kuang
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2015
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/fm2a8z

碩士 === 國立中山大學 === 資訊工程學系研究所 === 103 === Following by the progressive technologies, the most important thing that people need to care about is power consumption due to the products toward portable and lightweight devices. Every day, people use electronic products and cannot separate their life without them. For the image processing appilcations on electronic products, human gradually pay attention to the image quality. In other words, it has to perform more computations. Therefore, improving the computation speed of electronic product becomes one way to solve this problem. However, higher computation ability will consume more power. Hence the designers begins to focus on low-power design. In this thesis, we present a unified shader which combines variable precision modes and multi-thread based on ATTILA simulator. This shader combines vertex shader and pixel shader into one unified shader, and provides eight shaders to upgrade the throughput and the utility rate of data. Moreover, we integrate four precision modes into the vector arithmetic unit and the special function arithmetic unit to reduce the power consumption by adjusting the precision of the input and output operands. In addition, clock gating technique is applied to reduce the clock power of register files and pipeline registers, and the switching activities of these following hardware circuits. Following those steps, significant power saving can be achieved in the proposed multi-precision unified shader under the acceptable image distortion.