The Imagine Stream Processor

The Imagine Stream Processor is a single-chip programmable media processor with 48 parallel ALUs. At 400 MHz, this translates to a peak arithmetic rate of 16 GFLOPS on single-precision data and 32 GOPS on 16 bit fixed-point data. The scalability of Imagine´s programming model and architecture enable it to achieve such high arithmetic rates. Imagine executes applications that have been mapped to the stream programming model. The stream model decomposes applications into a set of computation kernels that operate on data streams. This mapping exposes the inherent locality and parallelism in the application, and Imagine exploits the locality and parallelism to provide a scalable architecture that supports 48 ALUs on a single chip. This paper presents the Imagine architecture and programming model in the first half and explores the scalability of the Imagine architecture in the second half.