Task concurrency management experiment for power-efficient speed-up of embedded MPEG4 IM1 player

Addresses the concurrent task management of complex multimedia systems, like the MPEG4 IM1 (IMplementation 1) player. Starting with a critical part of the code in the IM1 player, we extracted the concurrency hidden by implementation decisions and represented it with our “grey-box” modeling approach. Based on this “grey-box” model, high-level transformations have been made to improve the concurrency. By scheduling the transformed graph, we have improved the performance of an important bottleneck in the system layer of the IM1 player while simultaneously lowering the system energy cost. A two-processor target platform is used in the experiment, combining processors running at a high Vdd (drain supply voltage) and a low Vdd respectively