The Impact of Multimedia Extensions for Multimedia Applications on Mobile Computing Systems

摘要

Multimedia is a key element in human-computer interaction systems. Multimedia applications, however, are among the most dominant computing workloads driving innovations in high performance and low power imaging systems. Parallel implementations of multimedia applications mostly focus on the use of parallel computers. Modern general-purpose processors, however, have employed multimedia extensions (e.g., MMX, VIS, MAX, AltiVec) or subword parallel instructions to their instruction set architectures to improve the performance of multimedia. This paper quantitatively evaluates the impact of multimedia extensions on multiprocessor systems to exploit subword level parallelism (SLP) in addition to data level parallelism (DLP). Experimental results for a set of multimedia applications on a representative multiprocessor array shows that MMX (a representative Intel's multimedia extension) achieve an average speedup ranging from 3x to 5x over the same baseline multiprocessor array. MMX also outperforms baseline in both area efficiency (a 13% increase) and energy consumption (a 73% decrease), resulting in better component utilization and sustainable battery life. These results demonstrate that MMX is a suitable candidate for mobile multimedia computing systems.