Tightly-coupled MPEG-4 video encoder framework on asymmetric dual-core platforms

The paper performs a detailed analysis of a tightly-coupled scheme for multimedia applications on asymmetric multi-processor dual-core platforms. Existing partitioning methodologies for asymmetric dual-core systems typically perform software partitioning offline (during compile time), and assign tasks to either the RISC core or the DSP core. We study a tightly-coupled approach where the same computation task is assigned simultaneously in a tightly cooperative manner. An MPEG-4 simple profile video encoder has been implemented on a TI-OMAP 1510 platform for the analysis. Initial experiments show that using the tightly-coupled approach can increase the overall performance of a complicated multimedia system. The paper also illustrates the weakness of a current dual-core architecture design for the tightly-coupled approach and provides information for future improvement.