A Look-Ahead Task Management Unit for Embedded Multi-Core Architectures

Efficient utilization of multi-core architectures relies on the partitioning of applications into tasks and mapping the tasks to cores. In some applications (e.g. H.264 video decoding parallelized at macro-block level) these tasks have dependencies among each other. Task scheduling, consisting of selecting a task with satisfied dependencies and mapping it to a core, is typically a functionality delegated to the Operating System. In this paper we present a hardware Task Management Unit (TMU) that looks ahead in time to find tasks to be executed by a multi-core architecture. The look-ahead functionality is shown to reduce the task management overhead by 40-50% when executing a parallelized version of an H.264 video decoder on an architecture with up to 16 cores. In overall, the TMU-based multi-core architecture reaches a speedup of more than 14x on 16 cores running H.264 video decoding, assuming CABAC is implemented in a dedicated coprocessor.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: DSD
• Authors: Magnus Själander, Andrei Terechko, Marc Duranton
• Keywords: DSD 2008, H.264, Hardware, Multi-core Architecture, Task Management