VIS speeds new media processing
M. Tremblay, Mike O’Connor, Vijay Narayanan, Liang He · IEEE Micro · 1996
UltraSparc's Visual Instruction Set, described here in detail, accelerates some widely used media-processing algorithms by as much as seven times. Today's new media, increasingly sophisticated 3D graphics environments, videoconferencing, MPEG video playback, 3D visualization, image processing, and so on, demand enhancements to conventional RISC instruction sets, which were not originally designed to handle such applications. The Visual Instruction Set (VIS) is a comprehensive set of RISC-style instructions targeted at accelerating this new media processing.