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Parallelizing the H.264 decoder on the cell BE architecture

Published: 24 October 2010 Publication History

Abstract

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.

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cover image ACM Conferences
EMSOFT '10: Proceedings of the tenth ACM international conference on Embedded software
October 2010
318 pages
ISBN:9781605589046
DOI:10.1145/1879021
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 24 October 2010

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Author Tags

  1. cell be processor
  2. h.264 decoder
  3. macroblock prefetching
  4. parallelization
  5. software cache

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ESWeek '10
ESWeek '10: Sixth Embedded Systems Week
October 24 - 29, 2010
Arizona, Scottsdale, USA

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