Exploiting Coarse-Grain Parallelism in the MPEG-2 Algorithm

As the demand for multimedia applications increases, the performance of algorithms such as MPEG-2 video compression on general-purpose microprocessors is becoming more important. In this paper, we propose a number of coarse-grained parallel implementations of MPEG-2 decoding and encoding. We evaluate the performance of these implementations on a single-chip multiprocessor, and compare the performance against a baseline wide issue superscalar processor. On both MPEG-2 decoding and encoding, the single-chip multiprocessor achieves signi cantly better performance than a wide issue superscalar processor. We also nd that the coarse-grained parallelism in MPEG-2 is orthogonal to the ne-grained parallelism which can be exploited by multimedia extensions to the instruction set architecture such as Intel MMX. keywords: MPEG-2 decoding, MPEG-2 encoding, coarse-grained parallelism, single-chip multiprocessor, multimedia extensions