Efficient distributed memory management in a multi-core H.264 decoder on FPGA

Memory management is a challenging issue of multi-core architecture. With growing core numbers, Distributed Shared Memory (DSM) is becoming a general trend. In this paper, a DSM based multi-core architecture is explored and evaluated via an H.264 decoder application. The memory access and communication over Network-on-Chips is managed by the Data Management Engine (DME). Experimental results realized on an Altera Stratix VI show that 9-node distributed memory system increases performance by 1.5x compared to centralized memory. Moreover, the performance of proposed DSM architecture grows linearly with the number of cores deployed.