Motorola PowerPC{sup}TM microprocessor with AltiVec{sup}TM technology- the system engineer's answer to revolutionizing life cycle cost design paradigms with software-based high performance computing

摘要

System engineers are under increasing pressure to leverage standard components in their product designs. There are many reasons for this including time-to-market, complexity, supportability, and cost. However, there are many applications wherecommercial off the shelf technology (COTS), is just incapable of producing the solution that the system engineer has been asked to deliver. Traditionally image processing has been an area where off-the-shelf solutions have fallen woefully short indelivering acceptable system solutions, forcing the system engineer to drop back to using custom hardware, typically ASIC-based, to deliver the desired solution.This paper will examine a new technology trend in general purpose microprocessors - the inclusion of dedicated single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) functional units specifically designed to accelerate tasks such as image processing. It will review the evolution of microprocessors, then examine the AltiVec SIMD architecture of Motorola's G4 generation of PowerPC microprocessors, the MPC7400. The paper will then present how a typical image processing task, the 2-D convolution, can be implemented usingAltiVec and the performance and flexibility provided by this approach to image processing.