Patent ID: 7623132

Claim:
A shader, comprising: a processing engine for processing data, the processing engine having a plurality of serially connected processing stations in which an output of each of the plurality of serially connected processing stations is an input to another of the plurality of serially connected processing stations; and a shader register file directly connected only to a first processing station in the plurality of serially connected processing stations and to no other processing station in the shader or processing engine, wherein the processing engine is configured to forward results to the shader register file through the first processing station by following a set of rules, including a first rule that a shader register write is performed for a first instruction when a second instruction that immediately follows the first instruction is a serialized instruction, and, a second rule that a shader register read is performed for a third instruction that immediately follows the second instruction, wherein the shader register file can only store data received directly from the first processing station, and wherein the shader register file can only send stored data directly to the first processing station.