Vectorization for Real-Life Multimedia Applications on Processors’ Multimedia Extensions
Wei Jiang · Chinese Journal of Computers · 2005
Almost all vendors have added multimedia extensions (MME) to their processors to speedup multimedia applications. However, researches on automatic vectorization of compiler so far have not fully utilized these MMEs to boost the performance of real-life multimedia applications. This results from their focus on vectorization for normal arithmetic operations which rarely have speedup and their failure to fully exploit benefits from MME support for multimedia specific operations. These multimedia specific operations have various forms in source code, especially those expressed in multiple statements and scattered in program. This fact greatly hindered their vectorization. In this paper, the authors resolve this problem by enhancing the classic vectorization algorithm to flexibly and uniformly vectorize beneficial normal arithmetic and multimedia specific operations. The authors mainly added two extra steps: one to uniform the appearance of operations and the other to recognize vectorizable operations. The experiment shows that above algorithm has satisfactory performance improvement in several real-life multimedia applications. The results reach 43.9% maximum and 7.4% average speedup for Accelerating Suite of Berkeley Multimedia Workload. Furthermore, any system based on the algorithm the authors proposed can be extended to vectorize more complicate cases by simply adding corresponding rules.