Gerrit A. Slavenburg

Motion estimation performance of the TM3270 processor

Motion estimation constitutes a significant computational part of video standards such as MPEG2, MPEG4, and H264/AVC. This paper evaluates the performance of a motion estimation algorithm on the TM3270, a low-cost media-processor. In order to improve performance, the TM3270 processor provides architectural enhancements over previous TriMedia processors. We quantify the speedup of the proposed new operations to motion estimation performance. We show that the new operations incorporated in the TM3270 improve performance by a factor between 3 and 4. Furthermore, we quantify the speedup of data prefetching. We show that prefetching can improve performance up to 30%. By applying all TM3270 architectural enhancements, we show that standard resolution motion estimation can be performed in less than 5% of the available processor performance.