Implications of Programmable General Purpose Processors for Compression/Encryption Applications

With the growth of the Internet and mobile communication industry, multimedia applications form a dominant computer workload. Media workloads are typically executed on Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs), application specific processors (ASPs) or general purpose processors (GPPs). GPPs are flexible and allow changes in the applications and algorithms better than ASICs and ASPs. However, executing these applications on GPPs is done at a high cost. In this paper, we analyze media compression/decompression algorithms from the perspective of the overhead of executing them on a programmable general purpose processor versus ASPs. We choose nine encode/decode programs from audio, image/video and encryption applications. The instruction mix, memory access and parallelism aspects during the execution of these programs are analyzed. Memory access latency is observed to be the main factor influencing the execution time on general purpose processors. Most of these compression/dec...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2002
• Where: ASAP
• Authors: Byeong Kil Lee, Lizy Kurian John
• Keywords: ASAP 2002, Compression/decompression Algorithms, General Purpose Processors, Hardware, Memory Access