As portable handheld communication devices proliferate, more features are added to meet consumer demand such as digital video and audio. The ISO MPEG-4 standard is emerging as the predominant video and audio format for these applications. Based on standard 16-bit telecom DSP's, these devices must perform 8-bit video, 16-bit telecommunications and 32-bit audio computations to support these applications. The low power requirements of portable devices mean that these computations must be handled with maximum efficiency. Dynamically reconfigurable DSP's achieve the high efficiency required via cycle-to-cycle reconfiguration while retaining flexibility and programmability. The dynamically reconfigurable Infineon Carmel 20xx DSP is used to illustrate the point, with cycle savings of up to 90-percent on several computationally intense MPEG-4 algorithms.