Power Aware Graphics Hardware

功耗感知图形硬件如今，在几乎所有的电子设计中，功耗与速度一样重要。 诸如蜂窝电话、个人数字助理和手持游戏控制台的手持电子设备已经变得司空见惯，并且消费者除了更大的功能和性能之外还要求更长的电池寿命而不需要额外的重量。 这项研究解决了这一关键需求，开发高能效的图形硬件在手持设备中使用，这项研究的主要目标是探索使用异步（或无时钟）逻辑，以降低功耗的图形处理单元（GPU）的手持设备，同时保持一定的性能水平。 异步图形处理器承诺在许多方面降低功耗要求。 同步逻辑中持续运行的时钟会导致电路即使在没有工作的情况下也会消耗功率，而无时钟逻辑在空闲时基本上会断电。 因此，异步图形流水线将自然地适应不断变化的图形需求。 图形问题也是一个很好的匹配异步设计，因为它有许多流水线阶段，是宽容的延迟，并可以利用并行在细粒度的管道中的任何地方。 此外，其他特定于图形流水线的功耗优势预计将通过引入两个新功能来实现，这两个新功能由异步设计提供了极大的便利：按需计算和可变精度计算。

Power Aware Graphics HardwareToday, 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.