Hybrid scratchpad and cache memory management for energy-efficient parallel HEVC encoding

Abstract

The next-generation video coding standard High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) provides better compression rates for high resolution videos compared with H.264, at the cost of significantly increased needs for computation power and memory bandwidth. Therefore, memory subsystem optimization is of paramount importance to support HEVC on resource and energy constrained embedded consumer electronics. In this paper, we present a hybrid on-chip memory architecture with both caches and scratchpad memories (SPMs) for parallel HEVC encoding. A run-time prediction algorithm is proposed to effectively identify the most-frequently accessed memory regions in the search window(s) for processing individual coding tree units (CTUs). Depending on their intra- and inter-core reuses, these regions are loaded into the private or shared SPMs for guaranteed on-chip memory accesses. On the other hand, a relatively small hardware-controlled cache is used for the rest of data accesses. Moreover, an adaptive power gating scheme is proposed to power off SPM sectors with expired load windows to further reduce the on-chip leakage power. Compared with the state-of-the-art solution, experimental results show that our proposed memory management framework supports high speed parallel HEVC processing with substantially smaller on-chip memory size, which achieves up to 76.23% on-chip leakage energy savings, and 33.31% energy saving for the overall memory subsystem.