An enhanced DMA controller in SIMD processors for video applications

authored by

Guillermo Payá-Vayá, Javier Martín-Langerwerf, Sören Moch, Peter Pirsch

Abstract

Although current SIMD processor architectures can improve the processing performance by exploiting the data level parallelism inherent in video applications, an important performance penalty appears when processing data that is not formatted in an amenable way, e.g. unaligned memory access. This paper presents an enhanced DMA controller that performs block-based data transfers and a realignment when accessing a word in an external memory that is not aligned with the natural data memory/bus width boundary. Moreover, the enhanced DMA controller performs a signal extension while accessing data outside a specific region, e.g. a video frame, decreasing the total amount of processing cycles required for a typical video application. Performance improvements of up to 25% can be achieved when running a highly time consuming video encoding task (motion estimation) on a generic VLIW architecture with the enhanced DMA controller compared to a basic block-transfer DMA controller.

Organisation(s)

Institute of Microelectronic Systems

External Organisation(s)

videantis GmbH

Type

Conference article

Journal

Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)

Volume

5455 LNCS

Pages

159-170

No. of pages

12

ISSN

0302-9743

Publication date

2009

Publication status

Published

Peer reviewed

Yes

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Theoretical Computer Science, General Computer Science

Electronic version(s)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-00454-4_17 (Access: Closed)