A Multifunction Unit for Matrix, Vector and Elementary Functions Computation in Mobile GPU Shaders

Abstract

This paper presents a delay and area optimized multifunction unit with a wide operation set of matrix, vector, and elementary functions for mobile and wearable GPU shaders. The proposed unit unifies 25 non-trivial arithmetic operations on its single four-way arithmetic hardware. It employs two programmable modules for the unification of its operations. Novel unification architectures for these programmable modules are presented to optimize delay and area of the unit. Based on these architectures, the multifunction unit shows 10% and 3.5% reductions in its delay and area, respectively, compared with the prior art.