
III
Bending the
Pipeline
Today GPUs a re masters of performance, considering either high-end desktop
GPUs or even mobile GPUs, which deliver an unbelievable amount of graphics rel-
ative to the power consumption. The future of graphics raises a lot of question
regarding how to scale performance, doing more with less. Based on research on
petascale and exoscale supercomputers, we notice that such a scale of performance
forces us to reconsider memory, bandwidth, and data movement. Challenges are
ahead for GPU innovations. Under the name “bending the pipeline,” we include all
ideas that push the graphics pipeline to explore alternative ways to feed the