A media processor for multimedia signal processing applications

A multimedia system requires processing capabilities that include controlling functions as well as high throughput. For the consumer market, this processor must also satisfy low cost constraints. An efficient solution is the use of a dual-issue RISC architecture with key enhancements to target the high computation needs of multimedia applications. The RISC design methodology ensures its ease of programming and efficient controlling functions while its dual-issue approach lead to a high resource utilization. Key enhancements to this architecture include flexibility in the issuing control of the dual instructions; special instructions to implement SIMD parallelism; and full flexibility of half-word precision and double-word precision arithmetic instructions.