2D Vectorized Multimedia ISA

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Project Leader:

Roger Espasa (roger@ac.upc.es)
Mateo Valero (mateo@ac.upc.es)

Project Members

Jesús Corbal (jcorbal@ac.upc.es)
Francisca Quitana (paqui@ac.upc.es)

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Project Description

The goal of this project is to design a new ISA extension targeted at multimedia. The main new feature of  the ISA is that it will exploit 2D parallelism: first, sub-word parallelism as is currently done in MMX, VIS, MVI, etc. Second, multiple word parallelism using traditional vectorizing techniques. By providing  true vector registers to the multimedia unit (but of restricted length, say, 8 or 16 elements), an extra level of parallelism can be extracted from multimedia applications. The multimedia vector instructions provide  the capability to work with matrices of 8, 16 or 32-bit elements, which is a perfect match to the needs of  multimedia applications.