Graphics dalek Nvidia has filed for an extension to its patents  for a hierarchical processor array.

It looks like Nvidian thinks that Patent 7,634,637 can be extended to cover some new ideas it has to fix a core design problem  hat results in wide and ineffective graphics rendering pipelines. Nvidia has applied for a patent that describes the idea is that there are two or three tiers of processing cores with dedicated functions. The pipelines would include different shaders, such as a vertex shader unit, a geometry shader, a pixel shader and some others.

In the patent Nvidia says that "each massively parallel stage in a stage-by-stage pipeline tends to provide little granularity of control of portions of each parallel stage. Each "massively parallel stage becomes unwieldy and prohibitively time-consuming to design". As the massively parallel stage struggles during operation to find sufficiently wide units of work to fully occupy the data path its usage is cut back.

Nvida's cunning plan is to keep parallelisation efficient, by using multiple levels of processing hierarchies with multiple classes of graphics operations being associated with a different stage of graphics processing. Each level would include a module that is capable of processing all graphics functions. There would also be one top-level component that is able to distribute certain classes of work to lower level classes of processors.

It also comes out with a third-level class in the processor hierarchy that would be reserved for general purpose computations, and a specialised graphics function module that can perform graphics operations carried out based on frame buffer data.

The result is a design which is configured to execute a large number of threads in parallel.

More here.