An ALU cluster Intellectual Property Dedicated for media streaming architecture with homogeneous processor cores
Chia-Yi Liou, Chen-Chi Kuo, Herming Chiueh · 2008
Recent research shows the stream processing model is suitable for portable media applications. However, previous implementation of stream processors are suffered from their power consumption and cost for chip area. Thus, these designs focus on super computer architecture and scientific computation instead of real-time media applications. This paper proposes an arithmetic logic unit (ALU) cluster intellectual property (IP) with advanced microcontroller bus architecture (AMBA) platform interface, which is utilized as a reconfigurable hardware accelerator for portable media applications. The proposed design is implemented and fabricated using TSMC 0.15 um technology with backend magnetic RAM (MRAM) process integration. The performance evaluation shows this design improves 3.09 times averagely and 4.28 times at most with different combinations of activated clusters in homogeneous cores. The measurement result also reveals double power efficiency for previous designs using traditional architectures. The combination of design methodologies in this work contributes a turnkey solution for developing media applications in modern portable devices.