Texture unit for general purpose computing

摘要

A texture unit may be used to perform general purpose mathematical computations such as dot products. This enables some general purpose computations and operations to be offloaded from a central processing unit to the texture unit. The texture unit may use linear interpolators in order to perform the dot product calculations.

主权项

1. A method comprising:
determining that a dot product coefficient is negative and changing the sign of the coefficient to a positive value; sending the positive value to a linear interpolator; indicating whether the interpolator should revise the sign of the resulting dot product texel data; and using the programmable linear interpolator, that does not accept negative coefficients, to calculate the dot product and to convert the sign of texel data in the dot product.