Apparatus and method for performing horizontal filter operations

A method comprising:

• decoding a packed N-tap finite impulse response (FIR) filter instruction, the packed N-tap FIR filter instruction indicating one or more source packed data operands comprising a plurality of packed data elements, at least 3 filter coefficients, and a destination storage location, the plurality of packed data elements comprising data from a signal to be filtered and the plurality of filter coefficients specifying a filter function to be applied;
• and
• executing at least N−1 multiplications on an FIR unit of a processor to generate at least N−1 products, each of the multiplications comprising one of the filter coefficients multiplied by one of the packed data elements;
• combining the at least N−1 products by the FIR unit in accordance with a specified type of FIR filter being implemented to generate a result packed data element to be stored in the destination storage location.

A machine-readable medium having program code stored thereon which, when executed by a processor, causes the processor to perform the operations of:

• decoding a packed N-tap finite impulse response (FIR) filter instruction, the packed N-tap FIR filter instruction indicating one or more source packed data operands comprising a plurality of packed data elements, at least 3 filter coefficients, and a destination storage location, the plurality of packed data elements comprising data from a signal to be filtered and the plurality of filter coefficients specifying a filter function to be applied;
• and
• executing at least N−1 multiplications on an FIR unit of a processor to generate at least N−1 products, each of the multiplications comprising one of the filter coefficients multiplied by one of the packed data elements;
• combining the at least N−1 products by the FIR unit in accordance with a specified type of FIR filter being implemented to generate a result packed data element to be stored in the destination storage location.