LCPC03: Paper Abstract

A Preliminary Study On the Vectorization of Multimedia Applications for Multimedia Extensions

Gang Ren, Peng Wu, David Padua

To appear at 16th Workshop on Languages and Compilers for Parallel Computing (LCPC03), College Station, TX, 2-4 October 2003

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Abstract

In 1994, the first multimedia extension, MAX-1, was introduced to general-purpose processors by HP. Almost ten years have passed, the present means of accessing the computing power of multimedia extensions are still limited to mostly assembly programming and the use of system libraries and intrinsic functions. Because of the similarity between multimedia extensions and vector processors, it is believed that traditional vectorization can be used to compile multimedia extensions. Can traditional vectorization effectively vectorize for multimedia extensions? If not, what additional techniques are needed? This paper tries to answer these two questions. Based on a code study of the Berke-ley Multimedia Workload, we identify several new challenges arise in vectoriz-ing for multimedia extensions, and provide some solutions to these challenges.