Multimedia applications are becoming increasingly common in personal computers. Hence efficient multimedia processing is required in general-purpose processors. Subword parallelism in the form of SIMD (Single-Instruction, Multiple-Data) processing has commonly been adapted for multimedia processing in general-purpose processors. However, there have been problems reported with this method. In addition, there have also been problems reported on the behaviour of conventional cache systems for multimedia applications.; This thesis briefly outlines the problems, and proposes a new general-purpose processor architecture known as Media-TCM (Media-Tightly-Coupled Memory). It uses a newly introduced feature known as TCM (Tightly-Coupled Memory) to gain performance. The TCM is a low-latency on-chip memory used for efficient handling of multimedia data. Several new instructions are introduced to assist this task. The features of the Media-TCM architecture are designed to be easily adaptable to the existing general-purpose processors.; The performance of the Media-TCM architecture is evaluated with the help of a simulation model which is developed using the SimpleScalar tool set. The performance is compared with those of a processor enhanced with the Altivec multimedia extension for PowerPC and a processor with no multimedia extensions. A simulation model for Altivec is not currently available. Hence, a simulation model for Altivec is also developed in this research for the purpose of comparison.; Five selected multimedia applications are implemented in three different styles and simulated. The simulation results reveal that the proposed Media-TCM architecture can provide significant performance improvements over the Altivec multimedia extension for three of the applications, but it is marginally worse on two of them. However, the Altivec implementations can still be executed in the Media-TCM architecture.
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