Performance analysis of an H.263 video encoder for VIRAM

Abstract

VIRAM (vector intelligent random access memory) is a vector architecture processor with embedded memory, designed for portable multimedia processing devices. Its vector processing capability results in high performance multimedia processing, while embedded DRAM technology provides high memory bandwidth with low energy consumption. We evaluate and compare the performance of VIRAM to digital signal processors (DSPs) and conventional SIMD (single instruction multiple data) media extensions in the context of video coding. In particular, we examine motion estimation (ME) and the discrete cosine transform (DCT) which have been shown to dominate typical video encoders such as H.263. We show that VIRAM outperforms other architectures by 4.6/spl times/ to 8.7/spl times/ in computing ME and by 1.2/spl times/ to 5.0/spl times/ in computing DCT.