PROCESSING ORDER IN BLOCK PROCESSING PIPELINES

摘要

A knight's order processing method for block processing pipelines in which the next block input to the pipeline is taken from the row below and one or more columns to the left in the frame. The knight's order method may provide spacing between adjacent blocks in the pipeline to facilitate feedback of data from a downstream stage to an upstream stage. The rows of blocks in the input frame may be divided into sets of rows that constrain the knight's order method to maintain locality of neighbor block data. Invalid blocks may be input to the pipeline at the left of the first set of rows and at the right of the last set of rows, and the sets of rows may be treated as if they are horizontally arranged rather than vertically arranged, to maintain continuity of the knight's order algorithm.

主权项

1. An apparatus, comprising:
an interface to a memory; and a block processing pipeline comprising a plurality of stages, each stage configured to perform one or more operations on a block of pixels passing through the pipeline; wherein the apparatus is configured to process blocks of pixels from a frame in the block processing pipeline according to knight's order, wherein the frame is subdivided into rows and columns of blocks of pixels, wherein, to process the blocks according to knight's order, the apparatus is configured to:
read the blocks of the frame from the memory via the interface;input a first block to the block processing pipeline;input one or more subsequent blocks to the block processing pipeline according to knight's order, wherein each subsequent block is located one row down and at least one column to the left of the location of the previously input block; andwrite processed blocks output by the block processing pipeline to the memory via the interface; wherein processing the blocks in knight's order spaces the blocks in the block processing pipeline so that adjacent blocks on a row are not concurrently processed at adjacent stages of the block processing pipeline.