This paper proposes an extension to general-purpose architectures to improve the performance of multimedia operations. More specifically, we consider the multimedia JPEG/MPEG standards and investigate the possibility to accelerate the Huffman encoding operation, which is a known performance limiting function, found in these standards. Our investigation suggests that it is possible to decrease the total number of execution cycles by 9% to 12% when the proposed unit is implemented as an extension to existing general-purpose hardware. This new extension is intended to be an integral part of a Multimedia Functional Unit (MFU) that performs specific multimedia operations in a time efficient manner.