Energy-saving techniques for low-power graphics processing unit

Abstract

This paper presents a graphics processing unit with energy-saving techniques. Several techniques and architectures are proposed to achieve high performance with low power consumption. First of all, low power core pipeline is designed with 2-issue VLIW architecture to reduce power consumption while achieving the processing capability of 400MFLOPS or 800MOPS. In addition, inter/intra adaptive mutli-threading scheme can increase the performance by increasing hardware utilization, and the proposed configurable memory array architecture can reduce off-chip memory accessing frequency by caching both input data and output results. Furthermore, for graphics applications, a geometry-content-aware technique called early-rejection-after-transformation is proposed to remove redundant operations for invisible triangles. As for circuit level power reduction, power-aware frequency scaling is proposed to further reduce the power consumption.