Latency and Bandwidth Considerations for MPEG-2 Video Decompression on Simultaneous Multithreaded Processors

摘要

This paper explores latency masking and memory bandwidth requirements of simultaneous multithreaded processors with multimedia enhancements when executing a video decompression algorithm. We start with a wide-issue superscalar processor model, enhance it by the simultaneous multithreading (SMT) technique, by multimedia units, and by an additional on-chip RAM storage. Our workload is a multithreaded MPEG-2 video decompression algorithm that extensively uses multimedia units. Various cache models and memory bandwidth considerations are simulated to increase performance of the simulated SMT processor models.