<title>MAP3D: a media processor approach for high-end 3D graphics</title>

Abstract

Equator Technologies, Inc. has used a software-first approach to produce several programmable and advanced VLIW processor architectures that have the flexibility to run both traditional systems tasks and an array of media-rich applications. For example, Equator's MAP1000A [Basoglu et al 99] is the world's fastest single-chip programmable signal and image processor targeted for digital consumer and office automation markets. The Equator MAP3D is a proposal for the architecture of the next generation of the Equator MAP family. The MAP3D is designed to achieve high-end 3D performance and a variety of customizable special effects by combining special graphics features with high performance floating-point and media processor architecture. As a programmable media processor, it offers the advantages of a completely configurable 3D pipeline -allowing developers to experiment with different algorithms and to tailor their pipeline to achieve the highest performance for a particular application. With the support of Equator's advanced C compiler and toolkit, MAP3D programs can be written in a high-level language. This allows the compiler to successfully find and exploit any parallelism in a programmer's code, thus decreasing the time to market of a given application. The ability to run an operating system makes it possible to run concurrent applications in the MAP3D chip [Baker-Harvey 991, such as video decoding while executing the 3D pipeline, so that integration of applications is easily achieved -using real-time decoded imagery for texturing 3D objects, for instance. This novel architecture enables an affordable, integrated solution for high performance 3D graphics.

Design and evaluation of a multimedia computing architecture based on a 3D graphics pipeline

“…With further developments and sophistication in multimedia applications, however, the boundary between mediaprocessors and graphics processors and their applications is becoming blurry, thus requiring unified architectural support for different types of media objects, such as image, video, and graphics [1]. Several new architectures, e.g., Berkeley Vector-IRAM [2], Stanford Imagine [1] and MAP3D [3], have been introduced to address the conglomeration of media objects. Berkeley Vector-IRAM is a vector processor combining vector processing and embedded DRAM technology.…”