Implementation of the AVS video decoder on a heterogeneous dual-core SIMD processor

Multi-core Application Specific Instruction Processors (ASIPs) are increasingly used in multimedia applications due to their high performance and programmability. Nonetheless, their efficient use requires extensive modifications to the initial code in order to exploit the features of the underlying architecture. In this paper, through the example of implementing Advance Video Coding (AVS) to a heterogeneous dual-core SIMD processor, we present a guide to developers who wish to perform task-level decomposition of any video decoder in a multi-core SIMD system. Through the process of mapping AVS video decoder to a dual-core SIMD processor we aim to explore the different forms of parallelism inherent in a video application and exploit to speed-up AVS decoding in order to achieve real time functionality. Simulation results showed that the extraction of parallelism at all levels of granularity, especially at the higher levels, can give a total speed-up of more than 195× compared to a software x86-based implementation, which enables realtime, 25fps decoding of D1 video.