Dual-Core Framework: Eliminating the Bottleneck Effect of Scalar Kernels on SIMD Architectures

Abstract

The efficiency of ubiquitous SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) media processors is seriously limited by the bottleneck effect of the scalar kernels in media applications. To solve this problem, a dual-core framework, composed of a micro control unit and an instruction buffer, is proposed. This framework can dynamically decouple the scalar and vector pipelines of the original single-core SIMD architecture into two free-running cores. Thus, the bottleneck effect can be eliminated by effectively exploiting the parallelism between scalar and vector kernels. The dual-core framework achieves the best attributes of both single-core and dual-core SIMD architectures. Experimental results exhibit an average performance improvement of 33%, at an area overhead of 4.26%. What's more, with the increase of the SIMD width, higher performance gain and lower cost can be expected.