Spotted: SGRT - a mobile GPU architecture for real-time ray tracing

A specialized hardware for ray tracing on mobile devices. Such hardware historically has difficulty finding traction, but samsung might have a chance with it, given its market strength. 
 
// published on High Perfomance Graphics-Latest Proceeding Volume // visit site

SGRT: a mobile GPU architecture for real-time ray tracing

Won-Jong Lee, Youngsam Shin, Jaedon Lee, Jin-Woo Kim, Jae-Ho Nah, Seokyoon Jung, Shihwa Lee, Hyun-Sang Park, Tack-Don Han

Recently, with the increasing demand for photorealistic graphics and the rapid advances in desktop CPUs/GPUs, real-time ray tracing has attracted considerable attention. Unfortunately, ray tracing in the current mobile environment is very difficult because of inadequate computing power, memory bandwidth, and flexibility in mobile GPUs. In this paper, we present a novel mobile GPU architecture called SGRT (Samsung reconfigurable GPU based on Ray Tracing) in which a fast compact hardware accelerator and a flexible programmable shader are combined. SGRT has two key features: 1) an area-efficient parallel pipelined traversal unit; and 2) flexible and high-performance kernels for shading and ray generation.