Compression/decompression DRAM for unified memory systems: a 16 Mb, 200 MHz, 90% to 50% graphics-bandwidth reduction prototype

Yabe, Y.; Aimoto, Y.; Motomura, Masato; Takizawa, T.; Miyamoto, Tomohiko; Iwasaki, Tadashi; Nakazawa, Yasuhiro; Fujii, Takehiro; Hamada, Mototsugu; Nagai, Naofumi; Yamashina, M.

doi:10.1109/isscc.1998.672507

Cited by 6 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…Buffer Compression. Many prior works [9,10,27,43,79,85,101] propose various frame buffer compression techniques, such as run-length encoding (RLE) and differential pulse code modulation (DPCM), which increase the effective DRAM bandwidth (by reducing the amount of transferred frame data) and thus improve display processing performance. BurstLink is orthogonal to these proposals and can further improve energy efficiency when combined with these compression techniques on redirected data to PSR.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

BurstLink: Techniques for Energy-Efficient Conventional and Virtual Reality Video Display

Haj-Yahya¹,

Park²,

Bera³

et al. 2021

Preprint

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Conventional planar video streaming is the most popular application in mobile systems, and the rapid growth of 360 • video content and virtual reality (VR) devices are accelerating the adoption of VR video streaming. Unfortunately, video streaming consumes significant system energy due to high power consumption of the system components (e.g., DRAM, display interfaces, and display panel) involved in this process.We propose BurstLink, a novel system-level technique that improves the energy efficiency of planar and VR video streaming. BurstLink is based on two key ideas. First, BurstLink directly transfers a decoded video frame from the host system (i.e., the video decoder or GPU) to the display panel, bypassing the host DRAM. To this end, we extend the display panel with a double remote frame buffer (DRFB), instead of the DRAM's double frame buffer, so that the system can directly update the DRFB with a new frame while updating the panel's pixels with the current frame stored in the DRFB. Second, BurstLink transfers a complete decoded frame to the display panel in a single burst, using the maximum bandwidth of modern display interfaces. Unlike conventional systems where the frame transfer rate is limited by the pixel-update throughput of the display panel, BurstLink can always take full advantage of the high bandwidth of modern display interfaces by decoupling the frame transfer from the pixel update as enabled by the DRFB. This direct and burst frame transfer of BurstLink significantly reduces energy consumption in video display by 1) reducing accesses to the host DRAM, 2) increasing the system's residency at idle power states, and 3) enabling temporal power gating of several system components after quickly transferring each frame into the DRFB.BurstLink can be easily implemented in modern mobile systems with minimal changes to the video display pipeline. We evaluate BurstLink using an analytical power model that we rigorously validate on a real modern mobile system. Our evaluation shows that BurstLink reduces system energy consumption for 4K planar and VR video streaming by 41% and 33%, respectively, and provides an even higher reduction as display resolution and/or display refresh rate increases.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

BurstLink: Techniques for Energy-Efficient Conventional and Virtual Reality Video Display

Haj-Yahya¹,

Park²,

Bera³

et al. 2021

Preprint

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show abstract

“…Using a unified main and frame buffer memory, bandwidth may be unsatisfactory, but it can be enhanced by a compressed frame buffer. The CompressDRAM [9] is an integrated DRAM with compression and decompression hardware for graphics data. It uses simple run-length encoding (RLE) or differential pulse code modulation (DPCM) to enhance bandwidth.…”

Section: The Compressed Frame Buffermentioning

confidence: 99%

A compressed frame buffer to reduce display power consumption in mobile systems

Shim¹,

Chang²,

Pedram³

ASP-DAC 2004: Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference 2004 (IEEE Cat. No.04EX753)

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Abstract-Despite the limited power available in a batteryoperated hand-held device, a display system must still have an enough resolution and sufficient color depth to deliver the necessary information. We introduce some methodologies for frame buffer compression that efficiently reduce the power consumption of display systems and thus distinctly extend battery life for hand-held applications. Our algorithm is based on a run-length encoding for on-the-fly compression, with a negligible burden in resources and time. We present an adaptive and incremental re-compression technique to maintain efficiency under frequent partial frame buffer updates. We save about 30% to 90% frame buffer activity on average for various hand-held applications. We have implemented an LCD controller with frame buffer compression occupying 1,026 slices and 960 flip-flops in a Xilinx Sprantan-II FPGA, which has an equivalent gate count of 65,000 gates. It consumes 30mW more power and 10% additional silicon space than an LCD controller without frame buffer compression, but reduces the power consumption of the frame buffer memory by 400mW.

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High-speed DRAM architecture development

Ikeda

Inukai

1999

IEEE J. Solid-State Circuits

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Compression/decompression DRAM for unified memory systems: a 16 Mb, 200 MHz, 90% to 50% graphics-bandwidth reduction prototype

Cited by 6 publications

References 1 publication

BurstLink: Techniques for Energy-Efficient Conventional and Virtual Reality Video Display

BurstLink: Techniques for Energy-Efficient Conventional and Virtual Reality Video Display

A compressed frame buffer to reduce display power consumption in mobile systems

High-speed DRAM architecture development

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