Optimizing Operand Transport Using Dynamic SIMDization in Multimedia Systems

Overview

For multimedia processing, modern Instruction-Level Parallel (ILP) processors are faced with limited parallelism and inevitable communication issues, as silicon feature size decreases and pipelines become wider. This paper proposes and evaluates a dynamic optimization mechanism that exploits regular operand distribution patterns in multimedia applications. The proposed methodology; improves performance by recognizing and extracting more parallelism than conventional ILP processors; lowers the burden of operand transport by localizing the communication between instructions based on the operand characteristics; and maintains binary compatibility by applying run-time optimization rather than requiring changes to the ISA, recompilation with a vectorizing compiler, or manual retargeting and optimization.