Parallel media processors for the billion-transistor era

This paper describes the challenges presented by single-chip parallel media processors (PMPs). These machines integrate multiple parallel function units, instruction execution, and memory hierarchies on a single chip. The combination of programmability and high performance on data parallelism is necessary to meet the demands of next-generation multimedia applications. Many research issues must be solved to realize the full potential of programmable media processors. This paper provides both a survey of research trends and issues in architecture and compiler design for programmable media processors, and an exploration of the potential performance of media processors over the next decade.