Programmable VLIW and SIMD Architectures for DSP and Multimedia Applications

Digital Signal Processing (DSP) and multimedia workloads are expected to be the dominant workloads on future computer systems. This is true in both low cost embedded applications that use specialized microprocessors like DSPs and in the generalpurpose processor market. Very Long Instruction Word (VLIW) architectures have multiple functional units to take advantage of vastly available Instruction Level Parallelism (ILP) in such applications. Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) techniques operate on multiple data in a single instruction (exploiting data parallelism). This paper proposes to evaluate the benefits of using the above two techniques for DSP and multimedia applications. Using a modern commodity processor from each category – Texas Instruments Inc.’s TMS320C6x (VLIW) and Intel’s Pentium II with MMX (SIMD), several DSP and multimedia benchmarks will be evaluated.