Silt: the bit-parallel approach

A particular form of parallelism, called bit-parallelism, is introduced. A bit-parallel organization distributes each bit of a data item to a different processor. Bit-parallelism allows computation that is sublinear with word size for such operations as integer addition, arithmetic shifts, and data moves. The implications of bit-parallelism for system architecture are analyzed. An implementation of a bit-parallel architecture based on a mesh with a bypass network is presented. Using a conservative estimate for cycle time, a Silt processor performs 64-b integer additions more than 10 times faster than the Connection Machine-2. Using current CMOS technology, a 16 M processor Silt system would be capable of nearly 500 billion 32-b adds per second. The application of the architecture to low-level vision algorithms is discussed.<>