In the past, multimedia technology focused mainly on designing high quality audio
and graphical imagery as well as providing adequate performance levels that the users
demand for multimedia applications. However, the concept of multimedia has expanded
into New-Media that involves variety use of multimedia data in consumer-oriented applications,
such as video conferencing, virtual reality, and multimedia games with 3-D effect
in video and audio. As the demands for multimedia applications increase, vendors
have come up with new cost-effective microprocessor designs to satisfy the complexity
of new media processing. One of the most efficient methods is to incorporate the special-purpose
multimedia processor into a general-purpose processor, thereby offering multimedia-related functions at a small cost. Most effective way to integrate the two different
processors is to extend the existing instruction set into a multimedia-oriented Instruction
Set Architecture, called Media ISA Extension. Currently, many microprocessor vendors
have produced variety of general-purpose processors with multimedia extensions.
This thesis aims to provide the overall design philosophy behind Media ISA Extension
and its effect on the overall performance of a general-purpose processor. In particular,
Sun Microsystems' Visual Instruction Set (VIS) media extension of UltraSPARC-V9
is studied. On the average, VIS provides a speed-up of 3 to 4 for various multimedia
applications. This performance improvement comes from the considerable reduction in
the number of instructions executed due to Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) execution
style of VIS media extensions. To examine how VIS improves multimedia performance,
the thesis studies the design concept, benefits and limitations of VIS extensions, and the performance of various multimedia applications with and without VIS extension.
Finally, the possible architectural modifications to the VIS extension for further
performance enhancement are suggested. / Graduation date: 2000
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ORGSU/oai:ir.library.oregonstate.edu:1957/33152 |
| Date | 09 June 1999 |
| Creators | Kwon, Young-Kyong |
| Contributors | Lee, Ben |
| Source Sets | Oregon State University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
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