July 13, 2011 13:30
Graphics processor (GPU) architectures: Graphics processor (GPU) architectures have evolved rapidly in recent years with increasing performance demanded by 3D graphics applications such as games. However, challenges exist in integrating complex GPUs into mobile devices because of power and energy constraints, motivating the need for energy efficiency in GPUs. While a significant amount of power optimization research effort has concentrated on the CPU system, GPU power efficiency is a relatively new and important area because the power consumed by GPUs is similar in magnitude to CPU power. Power and energy efficiency can be introduced into GPUs at many different levels: (i) Hardware component level - queue structures, caches, filter arithmetic units, interconnection networks, processor cores, etc., can be optimized for power. (ii) Algorithm level – the deep and complex graphics processing computation pipeline can be modified to be energy aware. Shader programs written by the user can be transformed to be energy aware. (iii) System level - co-ordination at the level of task allocation, voltage and frequency scaling, etc.
