Multimedia extensions for general purpose microprocessors: a survey

The last decade has seen the integration of audio, video, and 3D graphics into traditional workloads as well as the emergence of new workloads dominated by the processing of data representing such information. Initially, these emerging workloads were supported by dedicated, application-specific integrated circuits and digital signal processors. To avoid the added cost and complexity of these dedicated hardware solutions, microprocessor vendors have extended their architectures with instructions targeting multimedia applications. Despite general agreement on the direction of evolving workloads, there is little agreement on the nature of the architectural changes that should be made to support them. The focus of this work is to survey existing multimedia instruction sets and examine how their functionality maps to a set of computationally important kernels extracted from the previously developed Berkeley Multimedia Workload.