A fine-grained parallel implementation of a H.264/AVC encoder on a 167-processor computational platform

The emerging many-core architecture provides a flexible solution for the rapid evolving multimedia applications demanding both high performance and high energy-efficiency. However, developing parallel multimedia applications that can efficiently harness and utilize many-core architectures is the key challenge for scalable computing. We contribute to this challenge by presenting a fully-parallel H.264/AVC baseline encoder on a 167-core asynchronous array of simple processors (AsAP) computation platform. By exploiting fine-grained data and task level parallelism in the algorithms, we partition and map the dataflow of the H.264/AVC encoder to an array of 115 small processors coupled with two shared memories and a hardware accelerator for motion estimation. The proposed parallel H.264/AVC encoder is capable of encoding video sequences with variable frame sizes. The encoder presented is capable of encoding VGA (640 × 480) video at 21 frames per second (fps) with 931 mW average power consumption by adjusting each processor to workload-based optimal clock frequencies and dual supply voltages with less than 1dB loss in resolution.