DATA STORAGE AND ACCESS IN BLOCK PROCESSING PIPELINES

摘要

Block processing pipeline methods and apparatus in which reference data are stored to a memory according to tile formats to reduce memory accesses when fetching the data from the memory. When the pipeline stores reference data from a current frame being processed to memory as a reference frame, the reference samples are stored in macroblock sequential order. Each macroblock sample set is stored as a tile. Reference data may be stored in tile formats for luma and chroma. Chroma reference data may be stored in tile formats for chroma 4:2:0, 4:2:2, and/or 4:4:4 formats. A stage of the pipeline may write luma and chroma reference data for macroblocks to memory according to one or more of the macroblock tile formats in a modified knight's order. The stage may delay writing the reference data from the macroblocks until the macroblocks have been fully processed by the pipeline.

主权项

1. An apparatus, comprising:
a block processing pipeline comprising a plurality of stages each configured to perform one or more operations on blocks of pixels from a current frame passing through the pipeline; wherein the block processing pipeline is configured to store data from processed blocks of the current frame as reference data to a memory according to a tile format, wherein the tile format stores reference data from each processed block of the frame in a corresponding tile, wherein each tile includes two or more contiguous memory blocks in the memory, each memory block of a block request size of the memory, and wherein the tiles are stored to a reference frame in the memory in sequential order of the blocks of pixels in the frame; and wherein the block processing pipeline is further configured to fetch a window of reference data from a reference frame previously stored to the memory according to the tile format and process at least one block of pixels from the current frame according to the fetched window of reference data.