An Energy-Efficient Unified Register File for Mobile GPUs

Abstract

The programmability of mobile GPUs have raised in recently years, where the shaders inside are instructed by shading programs for realistic 3D effects. The register files for a conventional high throughput multithreaded shader consumes 10% to 20% energy of it. However the register usages of shading program are quite low. In order to reduce the dynamic energy for register file in a multithreaded mobile shader, this paper proposed an unified register file design to reduce both dynamic and leakage energy of it. The result shows that proposed design reduces 85% of dynamic energy in a multithreaded register file. Furthermore, the proposed design reduces 59% of leakage energy and 25% of area with negligible performance degradation. Also, the energy savings in proposed designs are at least 75% more than related work.