Chip multiprocessing and the cell broadband engine
Proceedings of the 3rd conference on Computing frontiers
Introduction to the cell multiprocessor
IBM Journal of Research and Development - POWER5 and packaging
A scalable parallel H.264 decoder on the cell broadband engine architecture
CODES+ISSS '09 Proceedings of the 7th IEEE/ACM international conference on Hardware/software codesign and system synthesis
Scalability of Macroblock-level Parallelism for H.264 Decoding
ICPADS '09 Proceedings of the 2009 15th International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Systems
An efficient software cache for H.264 motion compensation
SOC'09 Proceedings of the 11th international conference on System-on-chip
Overview of the H.264/AVC video coding standard
IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology
H.264/AVC baseline profile decoder complexity analysis
IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology
A QHD-capable parallel H.264 decoder
Proceedings of the international conference on Supercomputing
Architectural Decomposition of Video Decoders by Meansof an Intermediate Data Stream Format
Journal of Signal Processing Systems
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In this paper, we propose parallelization and optimization techniques of the H.264 decoder for the Cell BE processor. We exploit both frame-level parallelism and macroblock pipelining. The major bottleneck in achieving the real-time performance is the entropy decoding stage, CABAC. Our decoder eliminates this bottleneck by exploiting the frame-level parallelism available in the entropy decoding stage. A macroblock software cache and a prefetching technique for the cache are used to facilitate macroblock pipelining. In addition, an asynchronous macroblock buffering technique is used to eliminate the effect of load imbalance between pipeline stages. We evaluate the effectiveness of our approach by implementing a parallel H.264 decoder on an IBM Cell blade server. The evaluation results indicate that our parallel H.264 decoder (with CABAC entropy decoding) on a single Cell BE processor meets the real-time requirement of the full HD standard at level 4.0. Moreover, our decoder also satisfies the real-time requirement at level 4.1 when an additional Cell BE processor is used.