Redefining the relationship between scalar and parallel units in SIMD architectures

Abstract

SIMD architectures, comprising of both scalar and parallel units, have been widely used in media processors. To further improve the performance, much effort has been made to enhance the design of both units, while little attention has been placed on the relationship between the units. This paper demonstrates that a dynamic coupling mechanism, which can dynamically transform the scalar and parallel units between loosely and tightly coupled relationships, can achieve a better matching between existing SIMD architectures and media applications. The evaluation result shows that the dynamic coupling mechanism can achieve an average performance gain of 33.2% at an additional area cost of 4.57%.