The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
May. 15, 2001
Filed:
Jul. 07, 1998
Ole Bentz, Sunnyvale, CA (US);
Carroll Philip Gossett, Mountain View, CA (US);
Mark Goudy, Berkely, CA (US);
Silicon Graphics, Inc., Mountain View, CA (US);
Abstract
The present invention pertains to an apparatus for and method of mapping texture memory to a texture cache such that cache contention is minimized. Significantly, in one embodiment of the present invention, addresses of the texture memory are mapped to entries of the texture cache according to a predetermined hashing scheme. According to the one embodiment, texture memory is addressed as a virtually contiguous address space by a multi-dimensional index. The multi-dimensional index is further partitioned into a low order bit field and a high order bit field. Low order bits of the multi-dimensional index are directly mapped to low order bits of the cache address. High order bits of the multi-dimensional index are mapped to high order bits of the cache address according to a predetermined address-hashing scheme. Particularly, in one embodiment, high order bits of the multi-dimensional index are selectively “exclusive-or-ed” to generate corresponding addresses of the texture cache.