Current and future trends in embedded VLIW microprocessors applied to multimedia and signal processing

Although Very Long Instruction Word (VLIW) processors mix of performance, power consumption, flexibility and cost is a very good match for embedded systems in general and multimedia streaming ones in particular; they might be adversely exposed to increasing memory latencies, code size bloat and to some extent performance scalability with increasing issue width, This paper presents two extensions for such VLIW micros that have a large potential impact when applied to the highly competitive market of multimedia consumer applications and more recently streaming: Symmetric Multi Processor (SMP) cache coherency and multithreading; we present a quick summary of those developments carried out by STMicroelectronics within the framework of the ST200 family of embedded microprocessor and preliminary results obtained from their use in selected video and audio applications.