Thinking of attending SIGGRAPH this year? Interested in mobile graphics? Come along to our half-day course!
Desktop graphics cards can achieve impressive performance levels by making the best use of their available power, die area and capacity to dissipate heat. To produce graphics of comparable quality within the form factor of a mobile phone all aspects of modern real-time graphics must be put under scrutiny, from GPU hardware design and associated graphics APIs to the algorithms and techniques employed. At SIGGRAPH 2015, we will be running a half-day course providing a technical introduction to mobile graphics spanning the hardware-software spectrum, and exploring the state-of-the-art with practitioners at the forefront of mobile graphics.
The strict limits imposed by mobile form factors encourage an appreciation of all aspects of the hardware-software stack. By combining contributions from across the industry, reflecting the viewpoints of hardware, software, developer and researcher, this course will provide a solid basis for those new to the field as well as inspire attendees and hopefully motivate and accelerate mobile graphics.
Attendees will gain an understanding of what underpins power-efficient graphics and how thermal and power constraints influence decisions in both hardware and software. They will understand the trade-offs involved in designing a mobile GPU, how mobile hardware shapes the software stack, and how to write code to maximize the potential of mobile GPUs. The course will explore the trends in mobile graphics, including reducing driver overhead and minimizing memory bandwidth.
The course progresses from introductory material on mobile GPU design, software best practices and emerging technologies, to topic talks from development studios pushing the boundaries of mobile graphics.
The slides and course notes for each talk are linked from the table below. I recommend the notes versions, but note that Andrew Garrard talk has animations that are best seen in the slide ppt format.
In addition, there are extended course notes on mobile software development, an extension of Andrew's talk.
Download the slides and notes
This is the first time we've run this course and I'm all ears if you have an opinion on how it went, good or bad. Please feel free to get in touch through email/twitter or using the comment system below - whichever you prefer.
We are also considering running this again next year. If you are working on mobile, anywhere from hardware to applications, and think your work or results are noteworthy and would like to suggest them for a future version of this course, please get in touch! In fact, I'd love to hear about interesting developments in mobile, even if you aren't sure whether they are ready for public presentation yet.
Email: sam.martin@arm.com
The download link is dead
Thanks for the note letcc - I've updated the link.