Abstract 123 This paper presents a many-core visual computing architecture code named Larrabee, a new software rendering pipeline, a manycore programming model, and performance analysis for several applications. Larrabee uses multiple in-order x86 CPU cores that are augmented by a wide vector processor unit, as well as some fixed function logic blocks. This provides dramatically higher performance per watt and per unit of area than out-of-order CPUs on highly parallel workloads. It also greatly increases the flexibility and programmability of the architecture as compared to standard GPUs. A coherent on-die 2 nd level cache allows efficient inter-processor communication and high-bandwidth local data access by CPU cores. Task scheduling is performed entirely with software in Larrabee, rather than in fixed function logic. The customizable software graphics rendering pipeline for this

Progress in mobile graphics technology during the last five years has been swift, and it has followed a similar path as on PCs: early proprietary software engines running on integer hardware paved the way to standards that provide a roadmap for graphics hardware acceleration. In this overview we cover five recent standards for 3D and 2D vector graphics for mobile devices. OpenGL ES is a low-level API for 3D graphics, meant for applications written in C or C++. M3G (JSR 184) is a high-level 3D API for mobile Java that can be implemented on top of OpenGL ES. Collada is a content interchange format and API that allows combining digital content creation tools and exporting the results to different run-time systems, including OpenGL ES and M3G. Two new 2D vector graphics APIs reflect the relations of OpenGL ES and M3G: OpenVG is a low-level API for C/C++ that can be used as a building block for a high-level mobile Java API JSR 226.

Tile-based rendering appears to be a promising technique for low-cost, low-power 3D graphics platforms. This technique decomposes a scene into tiles and renders the tiles independently. It requires, however, that the primitives are sorted into bins that correspond to the tiles, which can be very time-consuming and may require a lot of memory bandwidth. The most often used test to determine if a primitive and a tile overlap is the bounding box test. This test checks if the 2D axis aligned bounding box of the primitive overlaps the tile and comprises four comparisons in the worst case. In this paper we show that the efficiency of the bounding box test can be improved significantly by adaptively varying the order in which the comparisons are performed depending on the position of the current tile. Experimental results obtained using several 3D graphics workloads show that the dynamic bounding box test reduces the average number of comparisons per primitive by 26 % on average compared to the best performing static version in which the order of the comparisons is fixed. 1.