Future Directions of Media Processors

Shunichi ISHIWATA  Takayasu SAKURAI  

IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Electronics   Vol.E81-C   No.5   pp.629-635
Publication Date: 1998/05/25
Online ISSN: 
Print ISSN: 0916-8516
Type of Manuscript: INVITED PAPER (Special Issue on Multimedia, Network, and DRAM LSIs)
Category: Multimedia
media processor,  VLIW,  multimedia extension,  wide memory bandwidth,  low power consumption,  

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Media processors have emerged so that a single LSI can realize multiple multimedia functions, such as graphics, video, audio and telecommunication with effectively shared hardware and flexible software. First, the difference between media processors and general-purpose microprocessors with multimedia extensions is clarified. Features for processes and data in the multimedia applications are summarized and are followed by the multimedia enhancements that the recent general-purpose microprocessors use. The architecture for media processors reflects the further optimized utilization of these features and realizes better price-performance ratio than the general-purpose microprocessors. Finally, the future directions of media processors are estimated, based on the performance, the power dissipation and the die size of the present microprocessors with multimedia extensions and the present media processors. The demand to improve the price-performance ratio for the whole system and to reduce the power consumption makes the media processor evolve into a system processor, which integrates not only the media processor but also the function of a general-purpose microprocessor, various interfaces and DRAMs.