AVS video decoder on multicore systems: Optimizations and tradeoffs

Newer video compression standards provide high video quality and greater compression efficiency, compared to their predecessors. Their increased complexity can be outbalanced by leveraging all the levels of available parallelism, task- and data-level, using available off-the shelf hardware, such as current generation´s chip multiprocessors. As we move to more cores though, scalability issues arise and need to be tackled in order to take advantage of the abundant computational power. In this paper we evaluate a previously implemented parallel version of the AVS video decoder on the experimental 32-core Intel Manycore Testing Lab. We examine this previous version´s performance bottlenecks and scalability issues and introduce a distributed queue implementation as the proposed solution. Finally, we provide insight on separate optimizations regarding inter macroblocks and investigate performance variations and tradeoffs, when combined with a distributed queue scheme.