Fast and scalable lock methods for video coding on many-core architecture

• We propose a centralized hardware lock method for many-core architecture.
• We propose a distributed hardware lock method for many-core architecture.
• We study and compare the performance of the two proposed lock methods and software lock.

Many-core processors are good candidates for speeding up video coding because the parallelism of these applications can be exploited more efficiently by the many-core architecture. Lock methods are important for many-core architecture to ensure correct execution of the program and communication between threads on chip. The efficiency of lock method is critical to overall performance of chipped many-core processor. In this paper, we propose two types of hardware locks for on-chip many-core architecture, a centralized lock and a distributed lock. First, we design the architectures of centralized lock and distributed lock to implement the two hardware lock methods. Then, we evaluate the performance of the two hardware locks and a software lock by quantitative evaluation micro-benchmarks on a many-core processor simulator Godson-T. The experimental results show that the locks with dedicated hardware support have higher performance than the software lock, and the distributed hardware lock is more scalable than the centralized hardware lock.