Reconfigurable instruction set processors: an implementation platform for interactive multimedia applications

Future interactive multimedia applications are characterized by a large variety of compression algorithms with highly parallel nested loops. It will not be efficient to design custom processors suitable for this wide range of applications due to the uncertainty on what is going to be executed. Instead, we must find ways to cope with such dynamic and compute intensive tasks. Reconfigurable instruction set processors can cope with this dynamism by specializing the hardware to the algorithm at hand at runtime. They achieve this thanks to a flexible fabric of coarse grained processing elements that can be reconfigured to perform different complex algorithms. This paper analyzes the performance improvements obtained by such programmable structures and discusses some of the critical issues, such as reconfiguration times.