Performance evaluation of multithreaded architectures for media processing applications

In this paper, we present an architecture framework called SYMPHONY consisting of a linear array of processors that exploits parallelism in media applications at micro (ILP) and macro (threads) levels. High speed communication and synchronization necessary for efficient multitheading is achieved using novel hardware and software mechanisms. We demonstrate the efficacy of the SYMPHONY framework by performance evaluation of an instance in the framework. We show that multithreaded architectures coupled with SIMD parallelism provides performance improvement in excess of 2/spl times/ over conventional superscalar architectures.