Analysis of video filtering on the cell processor

In this paper an analysis of bi-dimensional video altering on the cell broadband engine processor is presented. To evaluate the processor, a highly adaptive altering algorithm was chosen: the deblocking filter of the H.264 video compression standard. The baseline version is a scalar implementation extracted from the FFMPEG H.264 decoder. The scalar version was vectorized using the SIMD instructions of the cell synergistic processing element (SPE) and with AltiVec instructions for the Power Processor Element. Results show that approximately one third of the processing time of the SPE SIMD version is used for transposition and data packing and unpacking. Despite the required SIMD overhead and the high adaptivity of the kernel, the SIMD version of the kernel is 2.6 times faster than the scalar versions.