Arm Limited

Kenneth Edvard Østby

Jørn Nystad

Andreas Due Engh-Halstvedt

Toni Viki Brkic

Reimar Gisbert Döffinger

Stephane Forey

Amir Kleen

David James Bermingham

A graphics processing apparatus comprises fragment generating circuitry to generate graphics fragments corresponding to graphics primitives, thread processing circuitry to perform threads of processing corresponding to the fragments, and forward kill circuitry to trigger a forward kill operation to prevent further processing of a target thread of processing corresponding to an earlier graphics fragment when the forward kill operation is enabled for the target thread and the earlier graphics fragment is determined to be obscured by one or more later graphics fragments. The thread processing circuitry supports enabling of the forward kill operation for a thread including at least one forward kill blocking instruction having a property indicative that the forward kill operation should be disabled for the given thread, when the thread processing circuitry has not yet reached a portion of the thread including the at least one forward kill blocking instruction.

Forward killing of threads corresponding to graphics fragments obscured by later graphics fragments

A program is analyzed to identify instructions that will load external data and to determine whether such instructions are followed by a sequence of instructions that will produce the same result for each thread in a thread group if the data loaded by the load instruction is the same for each thread in the thread group. Each time there is an external load instruction, it is determined whether the data loaded by the external load instruction is the same for all threads of the thread group, and whether the external load instruction was indicated as being followed by a sequence of instructions that produce the same result if the external load instruction loads the same data value for each thread of a thread group. The subsequent instructions are then executed for only a single thread of the thread group, or for all the threads of the thread group.

Disabling thread execution when executing instructions in a data processing system

A graphics processing unitincludes a rasterizer, a thread spawner, a programmable execution unit, a varying interpolator, a texture mapper, and a blender. The programmable execution unitis able to communicate with the varying interpolator, the texture mapperand the blenderto request processing operations by those graphic specific accelerators. In addition to this, these graphics-specific accelerators are also able to communicate directly with each other and with the thread spawner, independently of the programmable execution unit. This allows for certain graphics processing operations to be performed using direct communication between the graphics-specific accelerators of the graphics processing unit, instead of executing instructions in the programmable execution unit to trigger the performance of those operations by the graphics-specific accelerators.

Data processing systems

Growing community of inventors

Cambridge, United Kingdom

Kenneth Edvard Østby