A particular form of parallelism, called bit-parallelism, isintroduced. A bit-parallel organization distributes each bit of a dataitem to a different processor. Bit-parallelism allows computation thatis sublinear with word size for such operations as integer addition,arithmetic shifts, and data moves. The implications of bit-parallelismfor system architecture are analyzed. An implementation of abit-parallel architecture based on a mesh with a bypass network ispresented. Using a conservative estimate for cycle time, a Siltprocessor performs 64-b integer additions more than 10 times faster thanthe Connection Machine-2. Using current CMOS technology, a 16 Mprocessor Silt system would be capable of nearly 500 billion 32-b addsper second. The application of the architecture to low-level visionalgorithms is discussed
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