Leveraging Predicated Execution for Multimedia Processing

—Modern compression standards such as H.264, DivX, or VC-1 provide astonishing quality at the costs of steadily increasing processing requirements. Therefore, efficient solutions for mobile multimedia devices have to effectively leverage instruction level parallelism (ILP), which is often achieved by the deployment of EPIC (Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing) architectures. A characteristical architectural feature to increase the available ILP in the presence of control flow is predicated execution. Compilers targeting those hardware platforms are responsible to carefully convert control flow into conditional/predicated instructions – a process called if-conversion. We describe an effective if-conversion algorithm for the CHILI – a novel hardware architecture specifically designed for digital video processing and mobile multimedia consumer electronic. Several architectural characteristics such as the lack of branch prediction units, large delay slots, and the provided ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: ESTIMEDIA
• Authors: Dietmar Ebner, Florian Brandner, Andreas Krall
• Keywords: Control flow, ESTIMEDIA 2007, Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing, Mobile Multimedia