Design space exploration of media processors: Ageneric VLIW architecture and a parameterized scheduler

This paper presents a new environment for exploring and optimizing VLIW architectures for multimedia applications. The environment consists of a generic VLIW architecture, in which virtually all characteristics can be changed, and an assembler with the corresponding parameterized scheduler based on an enhanced version of the list scheduling algorithm. A novel partitioned register file architecture is proposed and analyzed with this environment. This is performed using a highly time consuming task of the H.264 video decoder application. Performance improvements of up to 67% can be achieved when running this application on different architecture configurations.