TriMedia (mediaprocessor)

Philips TriMedia TM-1100 die

TriMedia is a family of very long instruction word media processors from NXP Semiconductors (formerly Philips Semiconductors). TriMedia is a Harvard architecture[citation needed] CPU that features many DSP and SIMD operations to efficiently process audio and video data streams. For TriMedia processor optimal performance can be achieved by only programming in C/C++ as opposed to most other VLIW/DSP processors which require assembly language programming to achieve optimal performance[citation needed]. High-level programmability of TriMedia relies on the large uniform register file and the orthogonal instruction set, in which RISC-like operations can be scheduled independently of each other in the VLIW issue slots. Furthermore, TriMedia processors boast advanced caches supporting unaligned accesses without performance penalty, hardware and software data/instruction prefetch, allocate-on-write-miss, as well as collapsed load operations combining a traditional load with a 2-taps filter function. TriMedia development has been supported by various research studies on hardware cache coherency, multithreading and diverse accelerators to build scalable shared memory multiprocessor systems.