Run-time reconfiguration scheduling of 3D-rendering on a reconfigurable system

Abstract

With the dramatically increasing demands for multimedia processing capabilities in portable electronic devices, the architectural supports for various multimedia computations in one platform are crucial to the success of a product. Although application-specific accelerators have performance advantages, their inflexibilities seriously impede the applicability and shorten product lifetime. On the other hand, a general-purpose processor has benefits to wide applicability but can not meet the real-time criteria in many cases. Therefore, we develop a platform consisting of a general-purpose CPU, an array of processing elements, and a shared memory to transfer data between them. In addition, we propose two scheduling methods, First-Come-First-Serve and Priority, to process the 3D models with a better performance. Experimental results indicate that the priority scheduling significantly improves the 3D-rendering in both computation speed and silicon area, compared with FCFS scheduling. Given the same speed requirements on both FCFS and priority scheduling methods, the priority scheduling requires only 75% of the silicon area. On the other hand, it yields 30% to 80% speedup with the same area. Moreover, with priority scheduling, its performance advantage can be further increased by skills such as partial reconfiguration and multi-context configuration, to reduce its reconfiguration overhead.