Image magnification and reduction using high order filtering on the cell broadband engine

Abstract

The IBM Cell Broadband Engine (BE) is a multi-core processor with a PowerPC host processor (PPE) and 8 synergic processor engines (SPEs). The Cell BE architecture is designed to improve upon conventional processors in terms of memory latency, bandwidth and compute power. In this paper, we describe a 2D graphics algorithm for image resizing which we parallelized and developed on the Cell BE. We report the performance measured on one Cell blade with varying numbers of synergic processor engines enabled. These results were compared to those obtained on the Cellpsilas single PPE and with all 8 SPEs disabled. The results indicate that the Cell processor can outperform modern RISC processors by 20x on SIMD compute intensive applications such as image resizing.