PROCESSOR ARCHITECTURES FOR MULTIMEDIA: A SURVEY
Borko Furht · 2001
this article, we present a survey of processor architectures designed to support multimedia applications. Designs of these architectures ranges from fully custom to fully programmable dedicated architectures, and to general-purpose processor architectures with an extensive support for multimedia. The classification of these architectures is shown in Figure 1. Dedicated Multimedia Processors General-Purpose Processors Function-Oriented Programmable Architectures Architectures Flexible Adapted Programmable Programmable Architectures Architectures Figure 1. Classification of processor architectures that support multimedia. Dedicated multimedia processors are typically custom designed architectures intended to perform specific multimedia functions. These functions usually include video and audio compression and decompression, and in this case these processors are referred to as video codecs. Besides the support for compression, some advanced multimedia processors provide also support for 2D and 3D graphics AT&T AV4310 H.261/MPEG-1 encoder AV4220A H.261 decoder AV6110 MPEG-2 C-Cube CL450 MPEG-1 decoder CL9100 MPEG-2 decoder LSI Logic L64112 MPEG-1 decoder L64002 MPEG-2 decoder SGS-Thompson Processor Architectures for Multimedia TI MVP IIT VCP NEC VSP3 Matsushita VDSP2 C-Cube VideoRISC Array Micros. Intel MMX (Pentium) Sun VIS (UltraSPARC) HP HP-PA RISC2 MIPS ISA&MDMX DEC MVI (Alpha) Cyrix M2 2 applications. Designs of dedicated multimedia processors ranges from fully custom architectures, referred to as function specific architectures, with minimal programmability, to fully programmable architectures. Furthermore, programmable architectures can be classified to flexible programmable architectures, which provide moderate to high flexibility, and ad...