Novel approaches to parallel H.264 decoder on symmetric multicore systems

Novel approaches to parallel H.264 decoder for symmetric multicore processors are presented. The basic partitioning of the decoder is coarse-grained and hybrid method of the data partitioning and functional partitioning. We investigate the performance bottleneck of the parallelized decoder, and propose two new approaches, software memory throttling and fair load balancing. The software memory throttling limits the number of cores involved in the parallel motion compensation to achieve better speedup and power-saving. The fair load balancing for deblocking filter reduces load imbalance caused by the conventional static partitioning method. From the evaluation on two different symmetric multicore platforms, proposed approaches show up to 24% of speedup when there is much bandwidth contention.