A 130.3 mW 16-Core Mobile GPU With Power-Aware Pixel Approximation Techniques

Abstract

Intensive pixel shading dominates the power dissipation of the graphics pipeline as the screen resolution grows. In this work, we propose a 130.3 mW 16-core mobile GPU with three pixel approximation techniques and a corresponding tile-based rasterization architecture. The proposed architecture can trade-off between power consumption and visual quality to provide power-aware capability, and is fabricated with TSMC 45 nm technology. The feasibility and effectiveness of these techniques are verified in this chip prototype. The implementation results show that, with satisfactory visual quality, 52.32% of the power consumption of the shader processors can be empirically reduced with an experimental Approximated Precision Shader architecture and a Screen-space Approximated Lighting technique. Furthermore, the Approximated Texturing technique can reduce 24.57% of L1 cache updates in our evaluation.