Color multimedia extensions for VLIW architectures

This paper presents a VLIW architecture extended with color multimedia extensions for color image and video processing. Traditional multimedia extensions (e.g., MMX, VIS, and MDMX) depend solely on generic subword parallelism whereas the proposed color multimedia extensions (CAX) supports parallel operations on two-packed 16-bit YCbCr (luminance-chrominance) values. Experimental results on a representative VLIW architecture show that CAX achieves a speedup ranging from 3.3x to 6.6x (an average of 5.2x) over the baseline VLIW processor performance. This is in contrast to MDMX (a representative MIPS multimedia extension), which achieves a speedup ranging from only 1.7x to 3.6x (an average of 2.7x) over the same baseline VLIW processor.