Understanding multimedia application characteristics for designing programmable media processors

摘要

Abstract: As part of our research into programmable mediaprocessors, we conducted a multimedia workloadcharacterization study. The tight integration ofarchitecture and compiler in any programmable processorrequires evaluation of both technology-driven hardwaretradeoffs and application-driven architecturaltradeoffs. This study explores the latter area,providing an examination of the application-drivenarchitectural issues from a compiler perspective. Usingan augmented version of the MediaBench multimediabenchmark suite, compiling and analysis of theapplications are performed using the IMPACT compiler.Characteristics including operation frequencies, basicblock and branch statistics, data sizes, working setsizes, and scheduling parallelism are examined forpurposes of defining the architectural resourcesnecessary for programmable media processors.!10