A fixed-point 3D graphics library with energy-efficient cache architecture for mobile multimedia systems

A 3D computer graphics (3DCG) library with energy-efficient cache architecture is implemented for mobile multimedia systems. The developed library is based on fixed-point arithmetic for low energy consumption. To achieve high performance, the library is optimized at both the assembly and the algorithm levels on 3 different advanced RISC machine (ARM) processors. In order to enhance energy-efficiency as well as performance, a series of simulations have been performed on application programs with various cache configurations. We find that a 2-way set associative cache consumes low energy with negligible performance degradation. In this cache system, the optimized library can achieve 66.1% performance improvement and 25.3% energy saving on average compared with the conventional 4-way set associative cache system. Software and hardware co-optimization achieves 67 K polygons/s with low energy consumption. We verified the graphics library with proposed cache architecture by implementing a mobile graphics LSI.