Automatic H.264 encoder synthesis for the Cell processor from a target independent specification

A target independent specification model, called CIC (Common Intermediate Code) has been proposed to specify an application in a fashion that all potential functional and data parallelism are explicitly defined by the programmer. After mapping of an application to the target processors it is performed to exploit the parallelism optimally, the CIC translator synthesizes the target-specific code automatically. As a case study, we specify a base-line H.264 encoding algorithm, known as x264, with CIC, and synthesize a parallel program for the Cell processor. To exploit data parallelism of macro-block processing in the motion estimation module, we introduce a novel way of representing a wave-front parallelism and a new type of channel, called array channel, in the CIC model. Preliminary experiments confirm the viability of the proposed methodology of parallel programming for multiprocessor embedded systems.