A Novel Reconfigurable Processor Using Dynamically Partitioned SIMD for Multimedia Applications

In this paper, we propose a novel reconfigurable processor using dynamically partitioned single-instruction multiple-data (DP-SIMD) which is able to process multimedia data. The SIMD processor and parallel SIMD (P-SIMD) processor, which is composed of a number of SIMD processors, are usually used these days. But these processors are inefficient because all processing units (PUs) should process the same operations all the time. Moreover, the PUs can process different operations only when every SIMD group operation is predefined. We propose a processor control method which can partition parallel processors into multiple SIMD-based processors dynamically to enhance efficiency. For performance evaluation of the proposed method, we carried out the inverse transform, inverse quantization, and motion compensation operations of H.264 using processors based on SIMD, P-SIMD, and DP-SIMD. Experimental results show that the DP-SIMD control method is more efficient than SIMD and P-SIMD control methods by about 15% and 14%, respectively.