Optimizing Operand Transport using Dynamic SIMDization in Multimedia Systems

For multimedia processing, modern instruction-level parallel (ILP) processors are faced with limited parallelism and inevitable communication issues, as silicon feature size decreases and pipelines become wider. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a dynamic optimization mechanism that exploits regular operand distribution patterns in multimedia applications. The proposed methodology i) improves performance by recognizing and extracting more parallelism than conventional ILP processors; ii) lowers the burden of operand transport by localizing the communication between instructions based on the operand characteristics; and iii) maintains binary compatibility by applying run-time optimization rather than requiring changes to the ISA, recompilation with a vectorizing compiler, or manual retargeting and optimization