Studies - Texture Prefetching
Several studies, including one done by
Hakura and Gupta, have demonstrated the efficiency of caching with
respect to texture mapping. However, the latencies of texture memory
systems is often too high to for a simple blocking cache, and some sort of
prefetching is required. Because the access patterns of texture mapping
are constrained, we designed a specialized prefetching architecture that
can take advantage of them. By separating the cache tags from the cache
data in time and introducing a reorder buffer that holds prefetched cache
blocks until they are needed by the cache, we are able to prefetch data
without worrying about conflicts introduced by prefetching. A cycle-
accurate simulator has shown that the architecture covers arbitrarily high
latencies with over 97% efficiency.
The primary developers of this prefetching texture cache architecture
are Homan Igehy, Matthew
Eldridge, and Kekoa Proudfoot. Details of
the work can be found in the HWWS '98 paper entitled Prefetching in a Texture Cache
Architecture.
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