Heterogeneous Multi-Core Architecture That Enables 54x AAC-LC Stereo Encoding
Hiroaki Shikano, Masaki Ito, Masafumi Onouchi, Takashi Todaka, Takanobu Tsunoda, Tomoyuki Kodama, Kunio Uchiyama, Toshihiko Odaka, Tatsuya Kamei, Ei Nagahama, Manabu Kusaoke, Yusuke Nitta, Yasutaka Wada, Keiji Richard Kimura, Hironori Kasahara · IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits · 2008
This paper describes a heterogeneous multi-core processor (HMCP) architecture that integrates general-purpose processors (CPUs) and accelerators (ACCs) to achieve exceptional performance as well as low-power consumption for the SoCs of embedded systems. The memory architectures of CPUs and ACCs were unified to improve programming and compiling efficiency. Advanced audio codec-low complexity (AAC-LC) stereo audio encoding was parallelized on a heterogeneous multi-core having homogeneous processor cores and dynamically reconfigurable processor (DRP) ACC cores in a preliminary evaluation of the HMCP architecture. The performance evaluation revealed that 54times AAC encoding was achieved on the chip with two CPUs at 600 MHz and two DRPs at 300 MHz, which achieved encoding of an entire CD within 1- 2 min.