Design and Implementation of the Multimedia Operation Mechanism for Responsive Multithreaded Processor

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<I>Responsive Multithreaded (RMT) Processor</I> is designed for distributed real-time systems. This paper focuses on the multimedia processing architecture of <I>RMT Processor</I>. Multimedia processing requires high-throughput calculation for bulky data processing. <I>RMT Processor</I> architecture is based on eight-way prioritized simultaneous multithreading, which executes each thread in order of priority. Since the priority of hard real-time threads is higher than that of multimedia processing threads, instruction issue slots used by the multimedia processing threads are few in <I>RMT Processor</I> when hard real-time threads are executed simultaneously. Therefore multimedia processing threads need to utilize instruction issue slots effectively to achieve high performance. We have designed a novel vector operation mechanism to process multimedia data efficiently in parallel. Because the same instructions are iterated in multimedia processing, the compound operation mechanism is designed to calculate more data per instruction in multimedia processing.