Implemenation of an ASIP for acceleration SAD operation

SAD 연산의 가속을 위한 멀티미디어 코프로세서 구현

An H.264 algorithm is commonly used for video compression applications. This algorithm requires a large number of data computations, for example, the sum of absolute difference (SAD) operation. We analyzed H.264 reference encoding workloads. The H.264 encoding program has 8.78% SAD operation. The SAD operation is to sum up 16 difference-values in H.264 $4{\times}4$ sub-blocks. In order to accelerate SAD operations, we implemented an application specific instruction-set processor (ASIP) that can execute SAD and data transfer instructions. The proposed coprocessor has an absolute value generator and a carry save adder (CSA) unit to sum up 8 difference-values per one clock cycle. We completed SAD operation in 2 clock cycles. Experimental results show that the performance is improved by 34% of total execution time.