Media Applications on Hyper-Threading Technology

This paper characterizes selected workloads of multimedia applications on current superscalar architectures, and then it characterizes the same workloads on Intel HyperThreading Technology. The workloads, including video encoding, decoding, and watermark detection, are optimized for the Intel Pentium 4 processor. One of the workloads is even commercially available and it performs best on the Pentium 4 processor. Nonetheless, due to the inherently sequential constitution of the algorithms, most of the modules in these well-optimized workloads cannot fully utilize all the execution units available in the microprocessor. Some of the modules are memorybounded, while some are computation-bounded. Therefore, Hyper-Threading Technology is a promising architecture feature that allows more CPU resources to be used at a given moment. Our goal, in this paper, is to better explain the performance improvements that are possible in multimedia applications using Hyper-Threading Technology. Our initial studies show that there are many unexplored issues in algorithms and applications for Hyper-Threading Technology. In particular, there are many techniques to develop better software for multithreading systems. We demonstrate different task partition/scheduling schemes and discuss their trade-offs so that a reader can understand how to Intel and Pentium are registered trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries. develop efficient applications on processors with HyperThreading Technology.