Multimedia extensions for DLX processor

In recent years, the success of Internet and World Wide Web, and the growing feasibility of image and video compression techniques have pushed multimedia into mainstream computing. These requirements necessitate new and modified hardware architectures enabling realtime multimedia applications. Three methods have been proposed for enhancing multimedia architectures namely dedicated processors, media processors and multimedia extensions for general-purpose processors. Multimedia extended instruction set is an efficient solution for public and widely used computers, because it offers a solution with less expense and high flexibility. In this paper, we propose an enhanced multimedia extended instruction set for the DLX RISC processor. The enhancement is shown by implementing typical multimedia applications. Our synthesis and simulation results show an average speedup of 3.3 for these applications at a expense of 3% growth in chip area.