CHALLENGES TO COMBINING GENERAL-PURPOSE AND MULTIMEDIA PROCESSORS

Multimedia workloads have always held an important role in embedded ap plications, but now they are becoming increasingly common in general-p urpose computing as well. Over the past three years, the major vendors of general-purpose processors (GPPs) have announced extensions to the ir instruction set architectures that supposedly enhance the performan ce of multimedia workloads. Merging new multimedia instructions with e xisting GPPs poses several challenges. Also, some doubt remains as to whether multimedia extensions are a real development or just a competi tion-induced fad in the GPP industry. If it is indeed a development, h ow must current processor microarchitectures change in reaction? Multi media extensions are here to stay, but compiler designers, language de signers, and microarchitects face large, difficult problems. The ultim ate solution will depend on collaboration between universities and ind ustry-a successful combination familiar to most processor designers.