Performance Analysis of an H. 263 video encoder for VIRAM

摘要: VIRAM (Vector Intelligent Random Access Memory) is a vector architecture processor with embedded memory, designed for portable multimedia processing devices. Its vector processing capability results in high performance multimedia processing, while embedded DRAM technology provides high memory bandwidth at low energy consumption. In this thesis, we evaluate and compare performance of VIRAM to other digital signal processors (DSPs) and conventional SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) media extensions in the context of video coding. In particular, we will examine motion estimation (ME) and discrete cosine transform (DCT) which have been shown to dominate typical video encoders such as H. 263. In doing so, we point out the advantages and disadvantages of certain VIRAM’s designs with respect to video coding. In addition, we also show that VIRAM outperforms other architectures by 4.6 x to 8.7 x in computing motion estimation and by 1.2 x to 5.9 x in computing discrete cosine transform. With appropriate VIRAM’s features, our simulation shows that VIRAM can achieve near realtime encoding of standard video QCIF sequences using exhaustive search for motion estimation.