XMT-GPU: A PRAM Architecture for Graphics Computation
University of Maryland, College Park, MD
37th International Conference on Parallel Processing, 2008. ICPP ’08, p.364-372
@conference{dubois2008xmt,
title={XMT-GPU: A PRAM Architecture for Graphics Computation},
author={DuBois, TM and Lee, B. and Wang, Y. and Olano, M. and Vishkin, U.},
booktitle={Parallel Processing, 2008. ICPP’08. 37th International Conference on},
pages={364–372},
issn={0190-3918},
year={2008},
organization={IEEE}
}
The shading processors in graphics hardware are becoming increasingly general-purpose. We test, through simulation and benchmarking, the potential performance impact of replacing these processors with a fully general-purpose parallel processor, without the fixed-function graphics hardware legacy of current graphics processing units (GPUs). The representative general-purpose processor we test against is XMT (for explicit multi-threading), a PRAM-like single-chip parallel architecture. Performance is compared for two characteristic shaders running in a fragment-limited GPU benchmark harness and on a cycle-accurate XMT simulator. The general-purpose processor is found to be significantly faster at a compute-only shader, but slower on a memory bound texture shader. Finally we analyze the design tradeoffs that would allow combining the best of both worlds: (i) a competitive XMT texture shader, with (ii) a general-purpose easy-to-program XMT many-core approach that scales up or down to the amount of parallelism provided by the application and is even compatible with serial code.
February 6, 2011 by hgpu