Evaluation of data-parallel splitting approaches for H.264 decoding
Florian H. Seitner, Ralf M. Schreier, Michael Bleyer, Margrit Gelautz · 2008
The high computational demands of the H.264 decoding process pose serious challenges on current processor architectures. A natural way to tackle this problem is the use of multi-core systems. The contribution of this paper lies in a systematic overview and performance evaluation of parallel video decoding approaches. Our study investigates six methods for accomplishing data-parallel splitting in strongly resource-restricted environments inherent to mobile devices. These methods are compared against each other in terms of run-time complexity, core usage, inter-communication and bus transfers. We present benchmark results using different numbers of processor cores. Our results shall aid in finding a splitting strategy that is best suited for the targeted hardware-architecture.