Understanding multimedia application characteristics for designing programmable media processors

As part of our research into programmable media processors, we conducted a multimedia workload characterization study. The tight integration of architecture and compiler in any programmable processor requires evaluation of both technology-driven hardware tradeoffs and application-driven architectural tradeoffs. This study explores the latter area, providing an examination of the application-driven architectural issues from a compiler perspective. Using an augmented version of the MediaBench multimedia benchmark suite, compiling and analysis of the applications are performed using the IMPACT compiler. Characteristics including operation frequencies, basic block and branch statistics, data sizes, working set sizes, and scheduling parallelism are examined for purposes of defining the architectural resources necessary for programmable media processors.