Decoding high-quality videos in real-time is becoming more and more difficult with the increasing resolution. In this paper, a novel hardware/software (HW/SW) partitioning is proposed with powerful SIMD (single instruction multiple data) instructions for the real-time AVS video decoder. Since most key functions that need large amounts of computations are optimized by SIMD instead of hardware, the distribution of workload between hardware and software is balanceable, and the performance of the video decoder is improved. Besides, the generality and programmability are also maintained. The proposed method is implemented on a 32-bit dual-issue RISC processor with 256-bit vector extension. The experimental results of conformation AVS test sequences show that the video decoder system can support the real-time decoding of AVS 1080p videos at 30 fps, and improve performance over 100 times compared to the original processor without the proposed method. Moreover, this approach could be easily applied to other video decoders, such as H.264 and VC-1.