Exploiting multimedia extensions with a data parallel language

This paper presents the use of the Multimedia C (MMC) language to develop multimedia applications. The MMC language was designed to support operations with multimedia extensions included in all modern microprocessors. Although the idea to extend high programming languages to support vector operations is not novel, we show that integration of multimedia extensions into C is valuable. This is specially true for idiomatic expressions which are difficult for a compiler to identify. The MMC language has been used to develop some of the most frequently used multimedia kernels. The presented experiments on these scientific and multimedia applications have yielded good performance improvements. Although this paper discuses the use of MMC, the key features of the MMC language and implementation of its compiler are also presented.