Patent ID: 7834880

Claim:
A silicon chip of a monolithic construction for use in implementing a multi-GPU graphics processing and display subsystem in a computing system having a CPU, a system memory, an operating system (OS), and a CPU bus, and a display device with a display surface, wherein said computing system supports (i) one or more software applications for issuing graphics commands, (ii) one or more graphics libraries for storing data used to implement said graphics commands, said silicon chip interfacing with said computing system and comprising: multiple GPU-driven pipeline cores, each said GPU-driven pipeline core having a graphics processing unit (GPU) supporting the parallelization of graphics processing using one or more parallelization modes; wherein said computing system further supporting multi-pipe drivers allowing said multiple GPU-driven pipeline cores to interact with said graphics libraries; a compositing unit for compositing images from partial frame buffers of according to a current parallelization mode, a routing center, operably connected to said CPU bus, for receiving a stream of graphics commands and data from said CPU, and distributing said graphics commands and data among said multiple GPU-driven pipeline cores, and collecting rendered results in the form of partial frame buffers from said multiple GPU-driven pipeline cores, and providing said partial frame buffers to said compositing unit for composition of images, for display on said display surface; a control unit for controlling the configuring and functioning of said multi-GPU graphics processing and display subsystem according to the current parallelization mode in operation, wherein said stream of graphics commands and data is distributed among said GPU-driven pipeline cores under the control of said control unit and depending on the current parallelization mode; a processing element (PE), with memory, for processing data within said silicon chip; a profiling functions unit for delivering benchmarking data to said multi-pipe drivers, wherein said benchmarking data includes data selected from the group consisting of memory speed, memory usage in bytes, total pixels rendered, geometric data entering rendering, frame rate, workload of each GPU-driven pipeline core, load balance among said GPU-driven pipelines cores, volumes of transferred data, textures count, and depth complexity; and a display interface, for displaying composited images on said display surface.