Accelerating Multimedia with Enhanced Microprocessors

A minimalistic set of multimedia instructions introduced into PA-RISC microprocessors implements SIMD-MIMD parallelism with insignificant changes to the underlying microprocessor. Thus, a software video decoder attains MPEG video and audio decom-pression and playback at real-time rates of 30 frames per second, on an entry-level workstation. Our general-purpose parallel subword hxstructions can accelerate a variety of multimedia programs. ultimedia is the integration of visual, audio, textual, and sensory information (see Figure 1). It is Eil basically information represented in different ways by different media datatypes. Multimedia information can facilitate more natural human-to-computer interactions, enhance communication, shorten learning time, or lesse