Tightly-coupled MPEG-4 video encoder framework on assymetric dual-core platforms

This paper performs detail analysis of a tightlycoupled scheme for multimedia applications on asymmetric multi-processor dual-core platforms. Existing partitioning methodologies for asymmetric dual-core systems typically perform software partitioning offline (during compile time), and assign tasks to either the RISC core or the DSP core. In this paper, we study a tightly-coupled approach where the same computation task will be assigned simultaneously in a tight cooperation manner. An MPEG-4 Simple Profile video encoder has been implemented on a TI-OMAP 1510 platform for the analysis. Initial experiments show that using tightly-coupled approach could increase the overall performance of a complicated multimedia system. The paper also illustrates the weakness of current dual-core architecture design for tightly-coupled approach and provides information for future improvement.