System and method for memory access

A direct memory access (DMA) controller, comprising:

• a plurality of elements, each element corresponding to a rendered atomic data item, each element having an element precision indicative of a size of the element;
• a unit of memory, the unit of memory based on a memory location and a packed representation of a plurality of the elements relative to the memory location;
• the unit of memory having a height and width defined by coordinates for iteratively referencing a plurality of elements based on a position in the unit of memory, the position specified based on a coordinate of the element in the unit of memory independently of a memory location in which the element resides;
• at least one instruction for moving the referenced elements to a destination, the instruction configured for referencing an element when the precision of the element is different than a word size of a memory storing the unit of memory;
• and
• a command distributor configured to:
• identify a portion of the elements outside a region, the region defined by an origin designated by a grid position of an element;
• and
• augment the elements in the identified portion.

A computer program product having instructions encoded on a non-transitory computer readable storage medium that, when executed by a system, cause the system to:

• identify an element, the element corresponding to a rendered atomic data item;
• determine an element precision indicative of a size of the element;
• identify a unit of memory based on a memory location and a packed representation of a plurality of the elements relative to the memory location, the unit of memory resides in a region of memory such that each row of the width represents contiguous memory and each column represents a stride offset from a consecutive row of the column;
• iteratively reference a plurality of elements based on a position in the unit of memory, the position specified based on a coordinate of the element in the unit of memory independently of a memory location in which the element resides;
• move the referenced elements to a destination;
• identify a portion of the elements outside the region, the region defined by an origin designated by a grid position of an element;
• and
• augment the elements in the identified portion.