Existing software applications should be redesigned if programmers want to benefit from the performance offered by multi- and many-core architectures. Performance scalability now depends on the possibility of finding and exploiting enough Thread-Level Parallelism (TLP) in applications for using the increasing numbers of cores on a chip.

Video decoding is an example of an application domain with increasing computational requirements every new generation. This is due, on the one hand, to the trend towards high quality video systems (high definition and frame rate, 3D displays, etc)...