A Processor Architecture with Effective Memory System for Sort-Last Parallel Rendering

In this paper, a consistency-free memory architecture for sort-last parallel rendering processors with a single frame buffer is proposed to resolve the consistency problem which may occur when more than one rasterizer try to access the data at the same address. Also, the proposed architecture reduces the latency due to pixel cache misses because the rasterizer does not wait until cache miss handling is completed when the pixel cache miss occurs. For these goals, a consistency-free pixel cache architecture and three effective memory systems with consistency-test units are presented. The experimental results show that the proposed architecture can achieve almost linear speedup up to four rasterizers with a single frame buffer.