Apple Inc.

Abdulkadir U Diril

Anthony P DeLaurier

Adam T Moerschell

James Han Wang

Tyson J Bergland

Techniques are disclosed relating to determining the location of a specified level of detail for a graphics texture. In some embodiments, an apparatus includes texture processing circuitry configured to receive information specifying a particular mipmap in a chain of stored mipmaps for a graphics texture and determine an offset address for the particular mipmap. In these embodiments, the texture processing circuitry is configured to determine the offset address by operating on a value that indicates a greatest potential chain size for chains of mipmaps in a graphics processing element. In these embodiments, the operating includes masking upper bits of the value based on a size of the texture and masking lower bits of the value based on a position of the specified mipmap in the chain of stored mipmaps. Disclosed techniques may reduce power consumption and/or area of circuitry configured to determine the offset.

Level of detail offset determination

Techniques relating to serial processing of pixels in a texture processing pipeline. In some embodiments, the pipeline receives pixel data for a set of pixels in parallel but processes the pixels in the set serially in a pipelined fashion. In some embodiments, the pipeline includes a stage configured to retain texel data for use by a subsequently processed pixel. They may allow overlapping texels to be fetched once for the set of pixels rather than multiple times for different pixels in the set. In some embodiments, the pipeline uses a selected ordering of serial processing for the pixels, where the ordering increases the potential for texel overlap, relative to one or more other orderings.

Serial pixel processing with storage for overlapping texel data

Techniques relating to providing clock signals to a storage element. Generally, different portions of a given storage element may be clocked according to different schemes. This technique may be pertinent to a storage element that has a portion for which the associated bit values do not change frequently relative to another portion of the storage element. For such a storage element, a high-frequency portion may be clocked upon an access to the storage element, while a low-frequency portion may be clocked only if there is a change in the associated bit values. This technique can be applied to various storage elements, including registers and FIFO buffer entries. An apparatus may be designed such that the low-frequency and high-frequency portions of a storage element do not change during operation. Alternatively, the low-frequency and high-frequency portions of the storage element may be changeable based on a current operating mode of the apparatus.

Storage element with multiple clock circuits

Techniques are disclosed relating to storing processed texture information. In some embodiments, a graphics unit is configured to store graphics textures in multiple different formats. In some embodiments, texture filtering circuitry in the graphics unit is configured to operate on texture information in a particular format, but not configured to operate on texture information in one or more of the plurality of different formats. In some embodiments, graphics circuitry is configured to receive texture information in the multiple different formats and process the information to generate processed texture information in the particular format that the texture filtering circuitry is configured to operate on. In some embodiments, the graphics unit includes a storage element with entries configured to store the processed texture information, and the texture filtering circuitry is configured to access processed texture information in an entry of the storage element as input for multiple different sampling operations.

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Mountain View, CA, United States of America

Abdulkadir U Diril