An optimized TTA-like vertex shader datapath for embedded 3D graphics processing unit

An alternative VLIW architecture of vertex shader datapath based on transport triggered architecture (TTA) is proposed in details. This architecture can exploit more instruction level parallelism (ILP) than traditional VLIW architecture by the fine-grained data transport. The proposed vertex shader architecture can also provide a simple and user-optimized inter-connection network which can efficiently reduce the complexity of interconnections design. The evaluation results show that the proposed architecture can achieve almost 18% reduction in interconnection number and 1.4 times improvement in code density compared with the multi-threaded expanded VLIW architecture (MT-eVLIW).