A Retargetable Preprocessor for Multimedia Instructions

Request for more computation power in the media computing domain has led to multimedia extensions in the instruction sets of modern processors. This has resulted in the implementation of new instructions which handle short data types and exploit subword parallelism for improving the performance. Compiler developments which aim at providing some degree of support to these instructions now emerge and usually fall into three categories: vectorization, idiom recognition and code generation. Unfortunately there is no consensus among constructors on the deenition of multimedia instructions. Therefore, very few works have addressed the general issue of exploiting multimedia instructions from high level languages. In this paper, we present a prototype preprocessor for exploiting multimedia instructions in "C" code. Our preprocessor relies on idioms recognition techniques for detecting potential usages of multimedia instructions and exploits a rule-based graph abstraction for the rewriting process.