A 130.3mW 16-core mobile GPU with power-aware approximation techniques

Abstract

In this work, a 130mW 16-core mobile GPU is fabricated with TSMC 45nm technology. With three approximation techniques, this proposed architecture can trade-off between power consumption and visual quality to provide power-aware ability. Implementation results show that, with satisfactory visual quality, 53% of the power consumption can be reduced with the proposed Approximated Precision Shader architecture and Screen-space Approximated Lighting technique. Moreover, the Approximated Texturing technique reduces 24.57% L1 cache requests in our evaluation.