ABSTRACT
Multimedia processing involves applications with a high demanding computational power. New capabilities have been included in modern processors to cope with these new requirements, and specific architectures have been designed to increase the performance of different multimedia applications. Thus, multimedia extensions were included in general purpose processors to exploit the single-instruction multiple-data (SIMD) parallelism that appears in signal processing applications. Moreover, new architectures, such as Graphics Processing Units (GPU), are being successfully applied to general purpose computation (GPGPU) and, specifically, image and video processing. In this chapter we discuss the impact of the usage of multimedia extensions and GPUs in multimedia applications and illustrate this discussion with the study of two concrete applications involving video analysis.
