An energy efficient hardware multithreading scheme for mobile ray tracing

Abstract

We present an energy-efficient multithreading architecture for mobile ray tracing, which constitutes a dynamic reordering of the rays in input buffer according to the results of cache accesses. Unlike to the previous works, our architecture is cost-effective, because it does not need dedicated memory for storing threads, and is also energy-efficient, because it does not bypass the invalidated rays. Simulation results show that our architecture is a potential graphics solution for low-power ray tracing hardware as it provides a better performance-energy efficiency up to 5.5 times that of previous architectures.