Slides (pdf)[6.3MB] - Graphics Hardware

• Avoid having unused HW blocks
• Clock still eats power
58 © NOKIA GraphicsHardware.ppt
Avoid any other kinds of waste
• Even with clock gating there’s leakage current from the silicon
• Voltage islands avoid leakage current, but can’t be turned on/off in
the middle of pipeline at quick demand
• Efficient use of hardware
• Example: don’t use all of 3D HW for 2D UI
• Example: dynamically scale voltage & frequency based on loads
• Example: unified shaders
• With separate shaders, within the same object, let alone the scene, the
bottleneck varies between the vertex and pixel processing
• Unified shaders are a very efficient use of HW