Dynamic enabling and disabling of SIMD units in a graphics processor

Abstract

Systems and methods to improve performance in a graphics processing unit are described herein. Embodiments achieve power saving in a graphics processing unit by dynamically activating / deactivating individual SIMDs in a shader complex that comprises multiple SIMD units. On-the-fly dynamic disabling and enabling of individual SIMDs provides flexibility in achieving a required performance and power level for a given processing application. In this way, embodiments achieve optimal usage of a graphics processing unit. Embodiments of the invention also achieve dynamic grain (e.g., medium grain) clock gating of SIMDs in a shader complex. Embodiments reduce switching power by shutting down clock trees to unused logic by providing a clock on demand mechanism. In this way, embodiments enhance clock gating to save more switching power for the duration of time when SIMDs are idle (or assigned no work).

Description

technical field [0001] Embodiments of the invention generally relate to the control of a single instruction multiple data (SIMD) unit in a graphics processing unit (GPU). Background technique [0002] The arithmetic unit of the graphics processor includes an arithmetic logic unit (ALU) or an arithmetic unit configured to perform integer, logical, and single / double precision floating point operations. [0003] Graphics processors may include arrays of arithmetic units known as shader cores. A shader core includes a shader pipeline (SP). For higher performance, multiple SPs can be configured to work together as stacked SPs. SPs can be configured as Quad Arrays (QP) and SIMD. All shader units per SIMD can conditionally execute the same ALU instruction on different sets of origin, vertex, or pixel values. In this way, SIMD provides arithmetic processing power to the graphics processor. [0004] In conventional GPUs with stacked SPs, SIMD can be statically enabled or disable...

AI Technical Summary

Problems solved by technology

However, traditional methods continuously and actively provide clock signals to these SIMD

This method increases the power consumption of the graphics processor and is inefficient

Images