Apple Inc.

Adam T Moerschell

Anthony P DeLaurier

Abdulkadir U Diril

Benjiman L Goodman

James S Blomgren

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 are disclosed relating to a cache configured to store state information for texture mapping. In one embodiment, a texture state cache includes a plurality of entries configured to store state information relating to one or more stored textures. In this embodiment, the texture state cache also includes texture processing circuitry configured to retrieve state information for one of the stored textures from one of the entries in the texture state cache and determine pixel attributes based on the texture and the retrieved state information. The state information may include texture state information and sampler state information, in some embodiments. The texture state cache may allow for reduced rending times and power consumption, in some embodiments.

Texture state cache

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.

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San Jose, CA, United States of America

Adam T Moerschell