VLSI Design
Volume 2007 (2007), Article ID 28686, 10 pages
doi:10.1155/2007/28686
Research Article

On SPARC LEON-2 ISA Extensions Experiments for MPEG Encoding Acceleration

P. Guironnet de Massas, P. Amblard, and F. Pétrot

TIMA Laboratory, 46 Avenu Félix Viallet, Grenoble Cedex 38031, France

Received 31 October 2006; Revised 19 January 2007; Accepted 30 May 2007

Academic Editor: Wieslaw Kuzmicz

Copyright © 2007 P. Guironnet de Massas et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

This paper presents the necessary steps to modify the implementation of the SPARCV8 architecture to enhance it with multimedia-oriented instructions. The purpose is improving video compression performance without designing dedicated coprocessors. We investigate the complexity of modifying a standard processor instruction set and show that, although not trivial, this is feasible in a few weeks. We implemented 12 new instructions and use some of them to optimize the computation of a demanding step of the MPEG encoding. The result is a performance increase of 67% in the execution of a part of this algorithm, allowing us to expect a 30% speedup in the execution of an MPEG video compression. The area increase of the integer unit is about 18% and the clock frequency is not significantly modified in an LEON-2 implementing 6 among 12 of the new instructions.