The art of deception: Adaptive precision reduction for area efficient physics acceleration

Thomas Y. Yeh, Petros Faloutsos, Milos Ercegovac, Sanjay J. Patel, Glenn Reinman

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Physics-based animation has enormous potential to improve the realism of interactive entertainment through dynamic, immersive content creation. Despite the massively parallel nature of physics simulation, fully exploiting this parallelism to reach interactive frame rates will require significant area to place the large number of cores. Fortunately, interactive entertainment requires believability rather than accuracy. Recent work shows that real-time physics has a remarkable tolerance for reduced precision of the significand in floating-point (FP) operations. In this paper, we describe an architecture with a hierarchical floating-point unit (FPU) that leverages dynamic precision reduction to enable efficient FPU sharing among multiple cores. This sharing reduces the area required by these cores, thereby allowing more cores to be packed into a given area and exploiting more parallelism.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings of the The 40th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture, MICRO 2007
Pages394-406
Number of pages13
DOIs
StatePublished - 2007
Externally publishedYes
Event40th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture, MICRO 2007 - Chicago, IL, United States
Duration: Dec 1 2007Dec 5 2007

Publication series

NameProceedings of the Annual International Symposium on Microarchitecture, MICRO
ISSN (Print)1072-4451

Other

Other40th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture, MICRO 2007
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityChicago, IL
Period12/1/0712/5/07

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • General Engineering

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