Architectural optimizations for a floating point multiply-accumulate unit in a graphics pipeline

Scientific visualization and virtual reality have pushed three-dimensional graphics engines to their limits for updating scenes in real-time. One bottleneck of graphic systems is the transformation of an object's vertices into normalized space based on an evaluated transformation stack. This operation as often done in floating point, requiring a fast floating point multiply-accumulate unit. This paper presents architectural optimizations to a graphics pipeline floating point multiply-accumulate unit by using block floating point and parallelism to bypass or merge trivial operations in the matrix multiplications.