Cost-effective Hardware Acceleration of Multimedia Applications

General-purpose microprocessors augmented with SIMD execution units enhance multimedia applications by exploiting data level parallelism. However, supporting/overhead related instructions (instructions necessary to feed the SIMD execution units such as address generation, packing/unpacking, permute, loads/stores, and loop branches) dominate media instruction streams accounting for 75-85% of the dynamic instructions. This leads to an under-utilization of SIMD execution units resulting in a throughput that ranges between 1-12% of the peak throughput. We accelerate multimedia applications by providing explicit hardware support to eliminate or reduce the impact of the supporting/overhead related instructions. Performance evaluation shows that such hardware can significantly improve performance over conventional SIMD enhanced general-purpose processors

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2001
• Where: ICCD
• Authors: Deependra Talla, Lizy Kurian John
• Keywords: Hardware, ICCD 2001, SIMD Execution Units, Supporting/overhead Related Instructions, Units Enhance Multimedia