A Survey on Recent Media Processor

by Min Xu

In this paper, based on previours survey on relatively well-known
media processors, we survey several less well-known media processors
recently emerged on the embeded market. Starting with the most
popular VLIW concept based architectures, Philip Trimedia and Fujitsu
MB93401, are discussed. These processors usually consist of wide issue
width and parallel subword operations (SIMD) support. However, these
conventional designs do not always satisfy some new market situations.
NUON, as an open media processing architecture, has gained a lot
of attention from many DVD player vendor. Its versatile functions
and open standard are very uniqe among other media processors. On
the other hand, low power media processor from SHARP (DDMP) used a
uniqe pipeline synchronous technique to reduce the power consumption
of inactive components. Finally, we will discuss the very mythical
PlayStation 2 video processor and summarize some architecture design
trend of media processor which enable extremely high performance for
data parallel applications.