Power Aware Graphics Hardware

节能图形硬件如今，在几乎所有的电子设计中，功耗与速度同等重要。手机、个人数字助理和手持游戏机等手持电子设备已经变得司空见惯，消费者除了要求更好的功能和性能外，还要求在不增加重量的情况下延长电池寿命。这项研究的主要目标是探索使用异步(或无时钟)逻辑来降低手持设备图形处理单元(GPU)中的功耗，同时保持给定的性能水平。异步图形处理器承诺在许多方面降低功耗需求。虽然同步逻辑中持续运行的时钟导致电路即使在不工作时也消耗功率，但无时钟逻辑在空闲时本质上是断电的。因此，异步图形流水线将自然地调整以适应不断变化的图形需求。图形问题也很适合异步设计，因为它有许多流水线阶段，对延迟有容忍度，并且可以在流水线中的任何地方利用细粒度的并行性。此外，通过引入两个由异步设计极大地促进的新功能：按需计算和变精度计算，有望实现图形管道特有的其他功率优势。

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.