The Reconfigurable Streaming Vector Processor (RSVPTM)

Abstract

The need to process multimedia data places largecomputational demands on portable/embedded devices.These multimedia functions share commoncharacteristics: they are computationally intensive anddata-streaming, performing the same operation(s) onmany data elements.The Reconfigurable StreamingVector Processor (RSVPTM) is a vector coprocessorarchitecture that accelerates streaming data operations.Programming the RSVP architecture involves describingthe shape and location of vector streams in memory anddescribing computations as data-flow graphs.Thesedescriptions are intuitive and independent of each other,making the RSVP architecture easy to program.They arealso machine independent, allowing binary-compatibleimplementations with varying cost-performance tradeoffs.This paper presents the RSVP architecture andprogramming model, a programming case study, and ourfirst implementation.Our results show significantspeedups on streaming data functions.Speedups forkernels and applications range from 2 to over 20 timesthat of an ARM9 host processor alone.