Parallel HD encoding on CELL

The Cell Broadband Engine Architecture (CBEA) is an excellent architecture for high performance distributed computing and multimedia processing. While the Cell/BE processor is capable of high definition H.264 encoding, there are still no such implementations available. In this paper, we present a parallel implementation of a HD H.264 encoder on this heterogeneous nine cores processor. First we implement a real time SD encoder on a single SPU by optimizing Motion Estimation algorithm, DMA transfers etc. Then we propose a pipelined parallel encoding algorithm for multicore processors, and use this algorithm to get a real time HD H.264 encoder (1920×1080@31fps) by using eight SPEs (58fps on 16 SPEs).