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A Reconfigurable SIMT Processor for Mobile Ray Tracing With Contention Reduction in Shared Memory.
- Source :
-
IEEE Transactions on Circuits & Systems. Part I: Regular Papers . Apr2013, Vol. 60 Issue 4, p938-950. 13p. - Publication Year :
- 2013
-
Abstract
- In this paper, we present a reconfigurable SIMT multi-core processor with a shared memory for mobile ray tracing. The proposed processor addresses two issues of SIMT architecture: branch divergence of concurrently executed threads and contention in a shared memory. Performance degradation due to the branch divergence is reduced by dividing a wide SIMT datapath into several narrow SIMT cores that execute independent threads asynchronously. The contention in a shared memory caused by the multiple SIMT cores is alleviated by introducing a new time-division multiplexing (TDM) scheme using multi-phase clocks. The SIMT cores send their requests to a shared memory sequentially not concurrently by synchronizing the SIMT cores with multi-phase clocks to hide arbitration delays. The processor achieves the same datapath utilization as 4-wide SIMT which has been widely used by CPU-based ray tracers while its area remains 68% of the 4-wide SIMT. As a result, the performance normalized to area is improved by 26% compared to previous work with negligible overheads (2.6% for area and 1% for power consumption). The chip was fabricated in 90 nm CMOS technology, and it contains 2.3 M logic gates and 19.3 KB SRAM. It consumes 221 mW at 100 MHz with Vdd=1.2~V. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]
Details
- Language :
- English
- ISSN :
- 15498328
- Volume :
- 60
- Issue :
- 4
- Database :
- Academic Search Index
- Journal :
- IEEE Transactions on Circuits & Systems. Part I: Regular Papers
- Publication Type :
- Periodical
- Accession number :
- 95452232
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.1109/TCSI.2012.2209302