Thread-parallel MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 encoders for shared-memory system-on-chip multiprocessors

This work focuses on speeding up MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 encoding by using thread parallelism for shared-memory, System-on-Chip (SoC) multiprocessors. Improving the performance of the MPEG encoders is shown by reducing the dynamic instruction count at multiple processor contexts and then mapping onto a configurable SoC multiprocessor. The resulting reduction in the dynamic instruction count of the parallelized MPEG-2 TM5 encoder for 32 processor contexts reaches a maximum of 95% and that of the MPEG-4 XViD a maximum of 83% for 16 processor contexts, both compared to the sequential encoder. To realize the parallelized encoders we present a configurable, N-way, extensible, bus-based, cache-coherent SoC multiprocessor, augmented with data-parallel coprocessors, and we give the VLSI implementation for the 2-way and 4-way configurations.