A Low-Power Implementation of 3D Graphics System for Embedded Mobile Systems

For mobile 3D graphics systems, even though performance requirements are met, an efficient power management is even more important for battery-powered mobile devices since they require a large number of arithmetic operations as well as a high frequency of memory accesses. According to the analysis of the power consumption of mobile 3D graphics pipelines and the slacks across the pipeline stages, we describe intra-frame and inter-frame DVS low-power techniques reducing the power consumption of mobile devices based on a variable voltage processor. Our implementation on a PDA development board shows that the proposed DVS techniques achieve an energy saving of up to 46% over a non-DVS implementation