A Load-Forwarding Mechanism for the Vector Architecture in Multimedia Applications

Nowadays, multimedia applications (MMAs) form an important workload for general purpose processors. Although the vector architecture is considered the most potential candidate for media processing, the traditional vector architecture has inefficiencies to execute MMAs. This paper proposes a media-oriented vector architecture, which improves the traditional one with a load-forwarding mechanism. The load-forwarding mechanism overcomes the inefficiency on utilization of the memory bandwidth. As a result, the proposed architecture achieves a higher performance with lower hardware cost than the traditional one. This paper evaluates the proposed architecture with architectural design parameters and finds out the most efficient size for the vector architecture when performing MMAs.