Media processing applications, such as three-dimensional graphics, video compression, and image processing, currently demand 10-100 billion operations per second of sustained computation. Fortunately, hundreds of arithmetic units can easily fit on a modestly sized 1cm2 chip in modern VLSI. The challenge is to provide these arithmetic units with enough data to enable them to meet the computation demands of media processing applications. Conventional storage hierarchies, which frequently include caches, are unable to bridge the data bandwidth gap between modern DRAM and tens to hundreds of...