Register Organization for Media Processing

Processor architectures with tens to hundreds of arithmetic units are emerging to handle media processing applications. These applications, such as image coding, image synthesis, and image understanding, require arithmetic rates of up to 1011 operations per second. As the number of arithmetic units in a processor increases to meet these demands, register storage and communication between the arithmetic units dominate the area, delay, and power of the arithmetic units. In this paper we show that partitioning the register file along three axes reduces the cost of register storage and communication without significantly impacting performance. We develop a taxonomy of register architectures by partitioning across the data-parallel, instruction-level parallel, and memory hierarchy axes, and by optimizing the hierarchical register organization to operate on streams of data. Compared to a centralized global register file, the most compact of these organizations reduces the register file area...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: HPCA
• Authors: Scott Rixner, William J. Dally, Brucek Khailany, Peter R. Mattson, Ujval J. Kapasi, John D. Owens
• Keywords: Arithmetic Units, Distributed And Parallel Computing, HPCA 2000, Register File, Register Storage