MPEG-4 and the New Multimedia Architectural Challenges

The recent development of multimedia applications made them one of the most popular and most demanding types of workloads. To meet the new requirements and to map all new multimedia functionality onto systems with restricted resources a dramatical need of visual data compression standards arose. This paper discusses the performance requirements of the MPEG standards and outlines some approaches to meet these requirements. The focus is on the first representative of the latest generation visual data compression standards MPEG-4. Its computational requirements and new architectural demands are analyzed. An innovative reconfigurable -architectural approach is presented as a new concept for a flexible and cost-effective implementation of multimedia processors. At the expense of three new instructions, the proposed mechanisms allow instructions, entire pieces of code, or their combination to execute in a reconfigurable manner. These three instructions are proposed as an ISA extension of a super-scalar processor to illustrate the advantages of this new concept.