Arm Norway as

Arm Limited

Edvard Sorgard

Jorn Nystad

Borgar Ljosland

Mario Blazevic

Andreas Due Engh-Halstvedt

Frank Klaeboe Langtind

Frode Heggelund

Thomas Jeremy Olson

Marius Bjorge

Ashley Miles Stevens

A device includes a processor and memory. The memory has stored thereon a plurality of executable instructions. The executable instructions, when executed by the processor, cause the processor to: receive an access request affecting an operation of the device; facilitate encryption and/or authentication across an interface coupled to the device, wherein the interface is configured to secure the access request; and execute the access request.

Microprocessor systems

A slave device communicates with a host system via a host communications bus. The host system includes one processing unit that can act as bus master and send access requests for slave resources on the slave device via the communications bus. The slave device platform includes a memory management unit, a programmable central processing unit and one slave resource. The memory management unit acts as an address translating device, and accepts requests with virtual addresses from a master device on the host system, translates the virtual addresses used in the access request to the 'internal' physical addresses of the slave's resources and forwards the accesses to the appropriate physical resource. When an address miss occurs in the memory management unit, it passes the handling of the access request over to the controlling CPU which executes software to then resolve the address miss and handle the access request.

Graphics processing microprocessor system having master and slave devices

When rendering a scene that includes a complex object made up of many individual primitives, rather than processing each primitive making up the object in turn, a bounding volume which surrounds the complex object is generated and the scene is then processed using the bounding volume in place of the actual primitives making up the complex object. If it is determined that the bounding volume representation of the object will be completely occluded in the scene (e.g. by a foreground object), then the individual primitives making up the complex object are not processed. This can save significantly on processing time and resources for the scene.

Graphics processing system

A scene to be rendered is divided into plural individual sub-regions or tiles. The individual sub-regionsare also grouped into differing groups of sets of plural sub-regions. There is a top level layer comprising a set of 8&#xd7;8 sub-regions which encompasses the entire scene area. There is then a group of four 4&#xd7;4 sets of sub-regions, then a group of sixteen 2&#xd7;2 sets of sub-regions, and finally a layer comprising the 64 single sub-regions. A primitive list building processor takes each primitive in turn, determines a location for that primitive, compares the primitive's location with the locations of the sub-regions and the locations of the sets of sub-regions, and allocates the primitive to respective primitive lists for the sub-regions and sets of sub-regions accordingly.

Method of and apparatus for processing graphics

A slave device communicates with a host system via a host communications bus. The host system includes one processing unit that can act as bus master and send access requests for slave resources on the slave device via the communications bus. The slave device platform includes a memory management unit, a programmable central processing unit and one slave resource. The memory management unit acts as an address translating device, and accepts requests with virtual addresses from a master device on the host system, translates the virtual addresses used in the access request to the 'internal' physical address of the slave's resources and forwards the access to the appropriate physical resource. When an address miss occurs in the memory management unit, it passes the handling of the access request over to the controlling CPU which executes software to then resolve the address miss and handle the access request.

Graphics processing microprocessor system having a master device communicate with a slave device

A slave device communicates with a host system via a host communications bus. The host system includes one processor that can act as bus master and send access requests for slave resources on the slave device via the communications bus. The slave device platform includes a memory management unit, a programmable central processor and one slave resource. The memory management unit acts as an address translating device, and accepts requests with virtual addresses from a master device on the host system, translates the virtual addresses used in the access request to the 'internal' physical addresses of the slave's resources and forwards the accesses to the appropriate physical resource. When an address miss occurs in the memory management unit, it passes the handling of the access request over to the controlling CPU which executes software to then resolve the address miss and handle the access request.

A graphics processor includes a graphics object list building unit that determines the location of each draw call in a scene to be rendered and generates a list of draw calls for each sub-region (tile) that the scene to be rendered is divided into. The draw call lists are stored in a memory. A graphics object selection unit of a renderer of the graphics processor then determines which draw call is to be rendered next by considering the draw call list stored in the memory for the sub-region (tile) of the scene that is currently being rendered.

A graphics virtual texturing system in which textures stored in a storage medium of a host system are divided into respective pages that are then loaded into a local memory of a graphics processing system for use. Each page of a graphics texture has an associated fade factor value that can be set by an application that is to use the texture to control the contribution that the page will be used to make to any texturing result that is generated using the texture page in question. The graphics processing system then controls the contribution of texture data from a texture page to texturing result data to be generated in accordance with the fade factor value associated with the texture page in question. This allows texture paging to be done in a more visually pleasing manner than just a binary 'page-is-here'/'page-is-not-here' switch.

Methods of and apparatus for using textures in graphics processing systems

In a tile-based graphics processing system, when an overlay image is to be rendered onto an existing image, the existing tile data for the existing image from the frame buffer in the main memory is pre-loaded into the local color buffer of the graphics processor (step). The overlay content is then rendered and used to modify the tile data stored in the color buffer (step). When the data for a given sampling position stored in the tile buffer is modified as a result of the overlay image, a corresponding dirty bit for the tile region that the sampling position falls within is set (step). Then, when all the rendering for the tile has been completed, the dirty bits are examined to determine which regions of the tile have been modified (step). The modified tile regions are written back to the output image in the frame buffer in the main memory (step), but any regions whose dirty bits have not been set are not written back to the frame buffer in the main memory.

Graphics processing systems

A graphics virtual texturing system in which textures stored in a storage medium of a host system are divided into respective pages that are then loaded into a local memory of a graphics processing system for use. If the texture page that is required for performing a texturing operation at an originally desired level of detail () is not present in the local memory of the graphics processing system (), the virtual texture lookup process loops back to try to sample the texture at an increased level of detail (), and so on, until texture data that can be used is found in the local memory of the graphics processing system (). This allows the texturing operation to proceed using texture data for the texel positions in question from a higher level (less detailed) mipmap in place of the originally desired texture data.

The early depth test stagesof a graphics processing pipelineare configured to broadcast informationabout fragments, etc., that pass those early depth tests to other stagesin the pipeline. The other stages in the pipeline then use the early depth test pass information to determine if the processing of any fragments that they are currently processing can be stopped.

Hidden surface removal in graphics processing systems

A 3D graphics rendering pipeline is used to carry out data comparisons for motion estimation in video data encoding. Video data for the pixel block of the video frame currently being encoded is loaded into the output buffers of the rendering pipeline. The video data for the comparison pixel blocks from the reference video frame is stored as texture map values in the texture cache of the rendering pipeline. Once the sets of pixel data for comparison have been stored, the rendering pipeline is controlled to render a primitive having fragment positions and texture coordinates corresponding to the data values that it is desired to compare. As each fragment is rendered, the stored and rendered fragment data is compared by fragment compare unit and the determined differences in the data values are accumulated in an error term register.

Differential encoding using a 3D graphics processor

A slave device () communicates with a host system () via a host communications bus (). The host system () includes one (or more) processing units that can act as bus masters and send access requests for slave resources on the slave device () via the communications bus (). The slave device platform () includes a memory management unit (), a programmable central processing unit () and one or more slave resources (). The memory management unit () acts as an address translating device, and accepts requests with virtual addresses from the master device or devices on the host system (), translates the virtual addresses used in the access requests to the 'internal' physical addresses of the slave's resources and forwards the accesses of the appropriate physical resources (). When an address miss occurs in the memory management unit (), it passes the handling of the access request over to the controlling CPU () which executes software to then resolve the address miss and handle the access request. The memory management unit () also includes a write buffer () into which it can write the write value received from a master on the host system () on an access when an address miss occurs, and a read buffer () for storing values relating to read requests that have generated an address miss.

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Trondheim, Norway

Edvard Sorgard