Power Aware Graphics Hardware

University Of North Carolina At Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill NC

Investigators

Abstract

Power Aware Graphics Hardware Today, power consumption is as important as speed in almost all electronic design. Handheld electronic devices, such as cellular phones, personal digital assistants, and handheld game consoles have become commonplace and consumers are demanding longer battery lifetimes without additional weight, in addition to greater functionality and performance. This research addresses this critical need for developing energy-efficient graphics hardware for use in handheld devices. The key objective of this research is to explore the use of asynchronous (or clockless) logic to reduce power consumption in the graphics processing units (GPUs) of handheld devices, while maintaining a given level of performance. An asynchronous graphics processor promises to reduce power requirements in many ways. Whereas the constantly running clock in synchronous logic causes circuits to consume power even when no work is being done, clockless logic is essentially powered down when idle. Thus, the asynchronous graphics pipeline would adjust naturally to the constantly varying demands of graphics. The graphics problem is also a good match with asynchronous design because it has many pipeline stages, is tolerant to latency, and can take advantage of parallelism at a fine granularity everywhere in the pipeline. Furthermore, other power benefits specific to graphics pipelines are expected to be achieved by introducing two new capabilities that are greatly facilitated by asynchronous design: on-demand and variable-precision computation.