Nvidia Corporation

Portalplayer, Inc.

Robert Quan

Parthasarathy Sriram

Ahmet Karakas

Jason Seung-Min Kim

Partha Sriram

Bhagawan Reddy Gnanapa

In some embodiments, a data processing system including an operation unit including circuitry configurable to perform any selected one of a number of operations on data (e.g., audio data) and a configuration unit configured to assert configuration information to configure the operation unit to perform the selected operation. When the operation includes matrix multiplication of a data vector and a matrix whose coefficients exhibit symmetry, the configuration information preferably includes bits that determine signs of all but magnitudes of only a subset of the coefficients. When the operation includes successive addition and subtraction operations on operand pairs, the configuration information preferably includes bits that configure the operation unit to operate in an alternating addition/subtraction mode to perform successive addition and subtraction operations on each pair of data values of a sequence of data value pairs.

Configurable system for performing repetitive actions

An architecture is described, wherein an operation unit, such as an arithmetic unit, is used for performing a variety of repetitive tasks. The present invention includes embodiments and related methods for power and computationally efficiency in performing repetitive tasks. The system includes an operation unit and a configuration control unit that is in communication with a processor. The processor sends the configuration information to the configuration unit and the configuration unit provides configuration information to the operation unit. The method includes configuring the operation unit using the configuration unit based on the configuration information, retrieving data from a designated location upon which the operation unit operates, and producing a result that is formatted and send to a destination.

System and method for using co-processor hardware to accelerate highly repetitive actions

The present invention provides a vector floating point unit (FPU) comprising a product-terms bus, a summation bus, a plurality of FIFO (first in first out) registers, a crossbar operand multiplexor coupled, a floating point multiplier, and a floating point adder. The floating point multiplier and the floating point adder are disposed between the crossbar operand multiplexor and the product-terms and summation buses, and are in parallel to each other. The invention also provides the configuration register and the command register in order to provide flexible architecture and the capability to fine-tune the performance to a particular application. The invention performs the multiplication operation and the addition operation in a pipelined fashion. Once the pipeline is filled, the invention outputs one multiplication output and one addition output at each clock cycle. The invention reduces the latency of the pipelined operation and improves the overall system performance by separating the floating point multiplier from the floating point adder so that the multiplication operation can be executed separately and independently of the addition operation.

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San Francisco, CA, United States of America

Robert Quan