Optimization of portable system architecture for real-time 3D graphics

The optimal architecture of personal digital assistants (PDA) system for real-time 3D graphics was analyzed by simulating the 3D applications on the various Advanced RISC Machines (ARM) processor platforms. Simulation results show that for 256/spl times/256 screen resolution, even the performance of 200 MHz StrongARM with 160 MHz floating point unit (FPU) shows only 1.78 % of the requirement of full 3D pipeline. To realize the real-time 3D graphics on PDA, the optimal architecture must contain hardware acceleration engine with embedded DRAM as the rendering stage. In this architecture, MAC-enhanced ARM9 without FPU that is used as a host processor can provide the necessary geometry operations and we verified this architecture by the implementation of a PDA chip.