Multimedia processing architectures

Multimedia-information processing, in terms of creation and generation, interpretation, enhancement, rendering, and encoding and decoding, has existed for a long time. However, its recent transition to digital processing has increased the demand for it to prodigious levels and placed performance and storage constraints on computational engines. For example, the mainstream multimedia applications of video processing and interactive realistic 3D-image generation require performance in the order of several billion operations per second and storage capacity in the order of many megabytes. These performances indicate only the current user requirements. Future demands, in a society relishing personalized multimedia services, are likely to exponentially increase the required computational performance for media mining and presentation. Alongside the need for increased performance is a paradoxical price constraint on multimedia computing devices. These devices, in order to be part of the public's everyday life, must achieve great performance, be easy to use, and cost little. Thus, processing multimedia information requires that mainstream digital devices offer a quantum leap in total computation, storage, and communication at an ever lower cost. This is a proclamation of a new era and new challenges for computer designers.