New SIMD instructions set for image processing applications enhancement

Due to its inherent data parallelism, image processing applications benefit from multimedia extensions SIMD instructions within general purpose processors. However, current multimedia extensions do not allow to simultaneously address different memory positions using indirect addressing, i. e. the desired memory position address is located within a register. This restriction forces to sequential execution at some program points. This paper shows a new set of instructions providing parallel indirect addressing to a specialized table and intended to be added to existing multimedia extensions. In order to evaluate the new instructions usefulness and feasibility, we have used SimpleScalar for testing some image processing applications, getting in some cases a speed up of 3.5.