Xgi Technology Inc.

Yuan-Chin Liu

Kuo-Wei Yeh

The present invention, a method of the arbitration of memory request for a computer graphics system, consecutively services the requests having the same type in the same period, thereby increasing the chance of page-hit. In this arbitration method, the length of a fixed period is defined by the 3-D graphics engine in accordance with the amount of memory cycles or the amount of the requests, and is used for controlling the amount of the requests of each type. The length of the period can be the cycles of servicing a block comprising a tile or several tiles. Alternatively, instead of defining a fixed length of the period, the 3-D graphics engine can choose another arbitration method of the present invention. Another arbitration method of the present invention is to mark a message at the end of the drawing block, so that the memory control can decide to rotate the service order to the next type of requests according to the block-end message received. The present invention groups and services the memory requests according to the property of 3-D pipelining. Therefore, the page-miss and read-write turnaround penalties can be reduced, so that data can be accessed more efficiently.

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Taichung, Taiwan

Yuan-Chin Liu