General-Purpose Processor Huffman Encoding Extension

This paper proposes an extension to general-purpose architectures to improve the performance of multimedia operations. More specifically, we consider the multimedia JPEG/MPEG standards and investigate the possibility to accelerate the Huffman encoding operation which is a known performance limiting function found in these standards. Our investigation suggests that it is possible to decrease the total number of execution cycles by 9% to 12% when the proposed unit is implemented as an extension to existing general-purpose hardware. This new extension is intended to be an integral part of a Multimedia Functional Unit (MFU) that performs specific multimedia operations in a time efficient manner. 1. Introduction In the past few years, an increase in demand for multimedia processing has been observed due to the fact that increasingly more applications utilize (digital) multimedia formats 1 . The operations needed to handle these multimedia formats have been summarized in multimedia stand..