Thread-parallel MPEG-2, MPEG-4 and H.264 video encoders for SoC multi-processor architectures

This study utilizes thread-level parallel techniques to significantly reduce the dynamic instruction count performance metric of the MPEG-2, MPEG-4 and H.264 video encoders. Such solutions are particularly applicable in portable devices as workload distribution among a number of parallel-executing processors decreases the individual processing requirements and allows for the real time video encoding. Due to the use of multiple processing engines in a consumer SoC the required clock frequency for real-time encoding, and hence power consumption, is likely to be considerably less than that of a single high-speed processor solution. The results presented demonstrate that reductions in dynamic instruction count in the range of 84% to 96% can be achieved for each of the encoders investigated.