With the rapid development of multimedia applications and wireless communication networks, consumer demand for video-over-wireless capability on mobile computing systems is growing rapidly. In this regard, this paper introduces YUV-aware instructions that enhance the performance and efficiency in the processing of color image and video. Traditional multimedia extensions (e.g., MMX, SSE, VIS, and AltiVec) depend solely on generic subword parallelism whereas the proposed YUV-aware instructions support parallel operations on two-packed 16-bit YUV (6-bit Y, 5-bits U, V) values in a 32-bit datapath architecture, providing greater concurrency and efficiency for color image and video processing. Moreover, the ability to reduce data format size reduces system cost. Experiment results on a representative dynamically scheduled embedded superscalar processor show that YUV-aware instructions achieve an average speedup of 3.9x over the baseline superscalar performance. This is in contrast to MMX (a representative Intel#s multimedia extension), which achieves a speedup of only 2.1x over the same baseline superscalar processor. In addition, YUV-aware instructions outperform MMX instructions in energy reduction (75.8% reduction with YUV-aware instructions, but only 54.8% reduction with MMX instructions over the baseline).