A smart stream controller for efficient implementation of streaming applications on the heterogeneous multicore processor

Recently, many embedded systems adopt the heterogeneous multi-core processors, such as the TI OMAP and the IBM Cell BE, to allow offloading computation-intensive tasks from the MPU to the DSP for satisfying the increasing complexity of the emerging DSP streaming applications, such as the audio/video coding. By conventional parallel programming, task management is handled by the MPU with the OS or runtime assist. However, the thick OS stack or the laborious task management will significantly degrade the performance. This paper proposed a dedicated programmable smart stream controller, conforming to the streaming computation, to offload the task management from the MPU to greatly reduce runtime overhead. The smart stream controller provides a set of simple and high-level APIs to facilitate parallel programming on the heterogeneous multi-core processors. In our 512×512 JPEG encoding simulations, the proposed dedicated smart stream controller achieves up to 80% performance improvement compared to its software counterpart, i.e. implementing a runtime on MPU. Additionally, the performance scalability and capability of the smart stream controller to take advantage of architectural parallelism, adapting to varying number of DSP cores, are also presented.