System on chip having processing and graphics units
System on chip comprising a general purpose processing element, a graphics processing unit and a display interface, supporting graphics visualization on mobile computing devices and on embedded systems.
1. A system on chip (SoC) integrating components of a graphics computer into a single semiconductor chip, for generating displayable images from input of data and commands, comprising:
first processors adapted to generate rendered results based on graphics data;
display interface circuitry, interfacing between the first processors and an external display device for outputting images;
a second processor, adapted to process the graphics data;
a cache memory adapted to be used by the second processor to cache general purpose instructions and data; and
a routing center, wherein the routing center:
distributes the graphics data to the first processors according to a parallelization policy;
receives the rendered results generated by the first processors; and
provides the rendered results to the display interface circuitry;
wherein the first processors, the display interface circuitry, the second processor, the cache memory, and the routing center are implemented on a single semiconductor chip.
2. The system on chip of claim 1 , wherein the second processor is a general purpose processing element (PE), connectable to the cache memory and performing instructions stored in said cache memory.
3. The system on chip of claim 1 , wherein the cache memory can be used by one or more of the first processors for storing graphics data.
4. The system on chip of claim 1 , wherein the routing center distributes the graphics data to the first processors according to a parallelization policy by:
partitioning the graphics data into one or more streams of polygon data; and
distributing one or more of the streams of polygon data to each of the first processors.
5. The system on chip of claim 1 , wherein the routing center distributes the graphics data to the first processors according to a parallelization policy by distributing the same graphics data describing an image to each of the first processors; and
wherein each of the first processors generates rendered results for a different area of the image.
6. The system on chip of claim 1 , wherein the routing center distributes the graphics data to the first processors according to a parallelization policy by:
partitioning the graphics data into one or more streams of frame data;
distributing one or more of the streams of frame data to each of the first processors.
7. The system on chip of claim 1 , further comprising a profiling module, wherein the profiling module determines one or more values for one or more performance parameters, wherein the one or more performance parameters comprise one or more of a memory speed, a memory usage, a frame rate, a workload of the one or more first processors, a load balance among the one or more first processors, and a volume of rendered results; and
wherein the routing center distributes the graphics data to the first processors based on the values for the one or more performance parameters.