System and method for fine-grain instruction parallelism for increased efficiency of processing compressed multimedia data

1 . A method of processing multimedia data comprising:

a. transferring an instruction from each of a plurality of sequencers to associated processing elements within an array of processing elements; and

b. processing the instructions by the array of processing elements using fine-grain instruction parallelism,

wherein the plurality of sequencers comprise fine-grain instructions for decoding compressed multimedia data.

2 . The method of claim 1 , wherein a selection mechanism coupled to the plurality of sequencers is used in selecting the associated processing elements.

3 . The method of claim 2 , wherein the associated processing elements are selected using a selection instruction of the selection mechanism.

4 . The method of claim 2 , wherein the selecting of the associated processing elements is prior to transferring of the instructions from the plurality of sequencers to the associated processing elements.

5 . The method of claim 1 , wherein the transferring of the instructions from the plurality of sequencers to the associated processing elements uses a diagonal mapping scheme.

6 . The method of claim 5 , wherein the diagonal mapping scheme loads a data memory of the processing elements in a diagonal order.

7 . The method of claim 1 , further comprising preprocessing the multimedia data prior to the transferring of the instructions from each of the plurality of sequencers to the associated processing elements.

8 . The method of claim 1 , further comprising using a data dependency map for decoding intra-prediction and inter-prediction elements of the multimedia data.

9 . The method of claim 1 , further comprising identifying a characteristic of the multimedia data.

10 . The method of claim 9 , wherein the characteristic of the multimedia data comprises audio, video, or graphics or a combination.

11 . The method of claim 1 , wherein the instructions of the plurality of sequencers are used to process common functional elements of multiple streams of multimedia data.

12 . The method of claim 11 , wherein the common functional elements of the multiple streams are processed simultaneously.

13 . The method of claim 11 , wherein the multiple streams each are encoded with one or more encoding schemes.

14 . The method of claim 1 , wherein the multimedia data includes spatial and temporal dependency.

15 . The method of claim 1 , wherein the processing elements of the array of processing elements are individually programmable.

16 . The method of claim 1 , wherein each of the plurality of sequencers comprises a unique instruction set.

17 . The method of claim 1 , wherein each of the plurality of sequencers comprises an independent instruction set.

18 . A system for multimedia data processing comprising:

a data parallel system for performing parallel data computations,

wherein the data parallel system comprises a fine-grain data parallelism architecture for decoding compressed multimedia data.

19 . The system of claim 18 , wherein the data parallel system further comprises:

a. an array of processing elements;

b. a plurality of sequencers coupled to the array of processing elements for providing and sending a plurality of instructions to associated processing elements within the array of processing elements;

c. a direct memory access component coupled to the array of processing elements for transferring the data to and from a memory; and

d. a selection mechanism coupled to the plurality of sequencers,

wherein the plurality of sequencers comprise fine-grain instructions for decoding the compressed multimedia data, wherein the selection mechanism is configured to select the associated processing elements.

20 . The system of claim 19 , wherein the sending of the plurality of instructions to the associated processing elements uses a diagonal mapping scheme.

21 . The system of claim 20 , wherein the diagonal mapping scheme is configured to load a data memory of the processing elements in a diagonal order.

22 . The system of claim 19 , wherein the instructions of the plurality of sequencers comprise common functional fine-grain instructions of a decoding algorithm for decoding the multimedia data.

23 . The system of claim 19 , wherein the processing elements of the array of processing elements are individually programmable.

24 . The system of claim 19 , wherein each of the plurality of sequencers comprises a unique instruction set.

25 . The system of claim 19 , wherein each of the plurality of sequencers comprises an independent instruction set.

26 . A method of processing multimedia data comprising:

sampling a datastream;

separating the datastream into homogenous subsets of data; and

processing the homogenous subsets using multiple selected processing elements for each subset,

wherein a plurality of instruction sequencers transfer fine-grain instructions to the selected processing elements for decoding the multimedia data stream, wherein a selection mechanism is used in selecting the processing elements.

27 . The method of claim 26 , further comprising preprocessing the datastream prior to the separating of the datastream.

28 . The method of claim 26 , wherein the preprocessing of the datastream comprises using a fine-grain selection scheme to select the subsets of data.