A Comparison Between Processor Architectures for Multimedia Applications

The efficient processing of MultiMedia Applications (MMAs) is currently one of the main bottlenecks in the media processing field. Many architectures have been proposed for processing MMAs such as VLIW, superscalar (general-purpose processor enhanced with a multimedia extension such as MMX), vector architectures, SIMD architectures, and reconfigurable computing devices. The question then arises: which architecture can exploit the characteristic features of MMAs the most? In this paper, first, we explain the characteristics of MMAs, after that we discuss the different architectures that have been proposed for processing MMAs. Subsequently, they are compared based on their ability to exploit the characteristics of MMAs. Superscalar processors with dynamic out-of-order scheduling provide higher performance than VLIW processors and than superscalar processors with in-order scheduling. Because superscalar architectures include complicated control logic for out-of-order execution, and because VLIW processors have to decode every instruction slot in parallel and need a register file with multiple read and write ports, they are more complex than single-issue vector architectures.