Engine to enable high speed context switching via on-die storage

An electronic device, comprising:

• a central processing unit;
• a graphics multiprocessor communicatively coupled to the central processing unit, comprising:
• an instruction cache to receive a stream of instructions;
• an instruction unit to dispatch instructions in the stream of instructions for execution;
• a general-purpose graphics processing compute block comprising a plurality of graphics processing cores, the graphics processing cores comprising a plurality of execution units to execute the instructions;
• a first shared memory communicatively coupled to the plurality of execution units, wherein the first shared memory is shared by the plurality of execution units;
• and
• a copy engine to:
• receive a signal from a scheduler indicating an initiation of a preemption process;
• stop an execution of an existing context on the at least a first of the plurality of execution units;
• copy context state data from the existing context on at least a first of the plurality of execution units to the first shared memory;
• generate a signal to indicate that a context preemption process is complete;
• and
• upload the context data from the first shared memory to a second memory, separate from the first shared memory.

A method comprising:

• receiving, in a copy engine of a general-purpose graphics processing compute block comprising a plurality of graphics processing cores, the graphics processing cores comprising a processor having a plurality of execution units to execute the instructions a signal from a scheduler indicating an initiation of a preemption process;
• stopping an execution of an existing context on the at least a first of the plurality of execution units;
• copying context state data from the existing context on at least a first of the plurality of execution units to a first shared memory;
• generating a signal to indicate that a context preemption process is complete;
• and
• uploading the context data from the first shared memory to a second memory, separate from the first shared memory.