TECHNIQUE FOR PERFORMING MEMORY ACCESS OPERATIONS VIA TEXTURE HARDWARE

摘要

A texture processing pipeline can be configured to service memory access requests that represent texture data access operations or generic data access operations. When the texture processing pipeline receives a memory access request that represents a texture data access operation, the texture processing pipeline may retrieve texture data based on texture coordinates. When the memory access request represents a generic data access operation, the texture pipeline extracts a virtual address from the memory access request and then retrieves data based on the virtual address. The texture processing pipeline is also configured to cache generic data retrieved on behalf of a group of threads and to then invalidate that generic data when the group of threads exits.

主权项

1. A computer implemented method for performing a generic data access operation for a group of threads executing on a processing unit, the method comprising:
receiving a memory access request from a thread within the group of threads; determining that a portion of data associated with the memory access request is not present in a cache memory unit; retrieving the portion of data associated with the memory access request from global memory; storing the portion of data within the cache memory unit during execution of the threads within the thread group; and flushing the portion of data from the cache memory unit upon determining that each thread within the group of threads has completed executing on the processing unit.