| Multimedia applications are becoming more and more popular as the reach of technology extends. The characteristics of multimedia applications vary widely, but they tend to involve huge amounts of data and computation. It is necessary to build hardware that efficiently meets the needs of these new and demanding applications.; This work considers two approaches to multimedia application acceleration, specialized hardware vs. optimized general hardware. In addition, some issues pertaining to high performance computing are examined such as optimizations for low-power as well as the design of individual units.; Chapter 1 discusses techniques to improve the performance of Physical Modeling, which is one particular multimedia application. This application is an interesting example since Physical Modeling is generally too computationally intensive for interactive simulation in general purpose machines.; Chapter 2 further develops the idea of specialized architecture for multimedia. In this chapter, a specialized reconfigurable machine is adapted to accelerate a number of graphic applications.; Highly specialized architecture is not the only approach to high performance multimedia. Chapter 3 discusses a new general purpose architecture that is tuned to exploit the superior instruction level parallelism available in multimedia applications.; In order to accelerate multimedia applications, it is also necessary to understand the execution characteristics of those programs. In Chapter 4, a simulation of the MediaBench multimedia benchmark set was conducted. This chapter shows that a number of significant differences exist between multimedia and SPEC applications.; Chapters 5 and 6 address problems at the component level of the multimedia processor. Chapter 5, deals with the efficient design of a register renaming unit, which is an important component of the superscalar processor. Chapter 6 discusses the reduction of on-chip power consumption through the application of bus coding and charge recovery techniques.; Each of these chapters contributes to the design of an efficient processor for multimedia applications. |
