Initial Results on Fuzzy Floating Point Computation for Multimedia Processors

During the recent years the market of mid low end portable systems such as PDAs or mobile digital phoneshave experimented a revolution in both selling volume and features as handheld devices incorporate Multimedia applications This fact brings to an increase in the computational demands of the devices while still having the limitation of power and energy consumptionInstruction memoization is a promising technique to helpalleviate the problem of power consumption of expensive functional units such as the floating point one Unfortunately this technique could be energy inecient for low end systems due to the additional power consumption of the relatively big tables required In this paper we present a novel way of understandingmultimedia floating point operations based on the fuzzy computation paradigm losses in the computation precision may exchange performance for negligible errors in theoutput Exploiting the implicit characteristics of media FP computation we propose a new technique called fuzzy memoization Fuzzy memoization expands the capabilities of classic memoization by attaching entries with similar inputs to the same output We present a case of study for a SH like processor and report good performance and power delay improvements with feasible hardware requirements