In 1994, the first multimedia extension, MAX-1, was introduced to general-purpose processors by HP. Almost ten years have passed, the present means of accessing the computing power of multimedia extensions are still limited to mostly assembly programming, intrinsic functions, and the use of system libraries. Because of the similarities between multimedia extensions and vector processors, it is believed that traditional vectorization can be used to compile for multimedia extensions. Can traditional vectorization effectively vectorize multimedia applications for multimedia extensions? If not, what additional techniques are needed? To answer these two questions, we conducted a code study on the Berkeley Multimedia Workload. Through this, we identified several new challenges arise in vectorizing for multimedia extensions and proposed some solutions to these challenges.
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