Programmable stream processors

The demand for flexibility in media processing motivates the use of programmable processors. Stream processing bridges the gap between inflexible special-purpose solutions and current programmable architectures that cannot meet the computational demands of media-processing applications. The central idea behind stream processing is to organize an application into streams and kernels to expose the inherent locality and concurrency in media-processing applications. The performance of the Imagine stream processor on these media application is given.