Avoiding Conversion and Rearrangement Overhead in SIMD Architectures (2006)

Content Provider	CiteSeerX
Author	Shahbahrami, Asadollah Juurlink, Ben Vassiliadis, Stamatis
Abstract	Single-Instruction Multiple-Data (SIMD) instructions provide an inexpensive way to exploit the Data-Level Parallelism in multimedia applications. However, the performance improvement obtained by employing SIMD instructions is often limited because frequently many overhead instructions are required to bring data in a form amenable to SIMD processing. In this paper, we employ two techniques to overcome this limitation. The first technique, extended subwords, uses four extra bits for every byte in a media register. This allows many SIMD operations to be performed without overflow and avoids packing/unpacking conversion overhead. The second technique, Matrix Register File (MRF), allows flexible row-wise as well as column-wise access to the register file. It is useful for many two-dimensional multimedia algorithms such as the (I) Discrete Cosine Transform, 2 × 2 Haar Transform, and pixel padding. In addition, we propose a few new media instructions. Experimental results obtained by extending the SimpleScalar toolset show that these techniques improve performance by up to a factor of 4.5 compared to a conventional SIMD instruction set extension.
File Format	PDF
Publisher Date	2006-01-01
Access Restriction	Open
Subject Keyword	Rearrangement Overhead Simd Architecture Matrix Register File First Technique Haar Transform Single-instruction Multiple-data Many Overhead Instruction Discrete Cosine Transform Pixel Padding Conventional Simd Instruction Medium Register Flexible Row-wise Extra Bit Simd Processing Inexpensive Way New Medium Instruction Register File Simplescalar Toolset Show Second Technique Many Simd Operation Performance Improvement Many Two-dimensional Multimedia Algorithm Unpacking Conversion Overhead Data-level Parallelism Column-wise Access Experimental Result Simd Instruction Multimedia Application
Content Type	Text