Performance Evaluation of Heterogeneous Chip Multi-Processor with MP3 Audio Encoder

This paper describes processing performance of MP3 audio encoding on a heterogeneous chip multi-processor (HCMP) that possesses different types of processing elements (PEs) such as general-purpose processors and special-purpose processors. The HCMP realizes higher performance than conventional single-core processors or even homogeneous multi-processors for some specific applications such as media processing under the condition of low operating frequency aiming at lower power consumption. In this paper, the performance of the HCMP is analyzed by studying parallelizing scheme and power control scheme of an MP3 audio encoding program and by scheduling the program onto the HCMP using these two schemes. As a result, it is confirmed that an HCMP consisting of three CPUs and two DRPs outperforms a single-core processor by a speed-up factor of 16.3, and a homogeneous multi-processor with 5 CPUs by a speed-up factor of 4.0. It is also confirmed that the power control on the HCMP results in 24 % power reduction