Abstract
Multimedia technology has become widely available and it has tremendous potential. As computers getting faster every day, multimedia applications are reaching new ground constantly. However, a fundamental problem of multimedia systems is the interprocessor/intermachine communication speed. In this paper, we introduce a platform based on the Scalable Coherent Interface (SCI, ANSI/IEEE std 1596). The system can be physically distributed but logically closely coupled. All processors/machines in an SCI system shared physical memory and cache coherence is maintained even among remote processors. The interprocessor communication bandwidth can be as high as 1 Gbyte/sec. We will discuss the features of SCI-based systems when multimedia application is considered.