Architectural evaluation of multicluster wide-issue video signal processors.

摘要

Multimedia applications are omnipresent nowadays and they are changing our life and society vastly. As they become more diverse and complex, the computational power required for real-time processing also increases greatly, which raises challenges to microprocessor architecture design. Because few general-purpose processors or traditional Digital Signal Processors (DSPs) can support the extraordinary computing demand generated by aggressive video applications, Video Signal Processors (VSPs) emerge as a solution to accelerate computation-intensive multimedia applications. While dedicated VSPs are available for MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 encoding and decoding, the need for greater functionality and time-to-market pressures will push the video industry towards programmable VSPs.;This thesis provides an overview of the problems involved in VSP design, including the multi-cluster architecture model, register and memory sizing, streaming computation, and so on. Analyses and solutions are also presented in addition to problem formulation. Understanding these problems well will help us realize architectural tradeoffs and pinpoint bottleneck in different stages of design sophistication.;Focusing on video applications, we use H.263, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 CODECs as our benchmark suite for studying architectural impact on video applications. In the thesis, we first introduce the architectural paradigm of the Princeton VSP, then we study the performance of those video applications on various architectures. We construct a trace-driven simulation framework with an efficient instruction scheduling algorithm and carry out several experiments, including studies on parallelization of video applications, architectural tradeoffs, memory systems, data partitioning schemes, performance estimation, etc. Finally an experimental compiler is presented.;Contributions of this thesis include development of automated tools to schedule complete applications on finely modeled architectures, and analytical comparisons of the impact of various architectural parameters as well as different designs. The results validate both our design methodology and our architectural approach.