MediaBench: a tool for evaluating and synthesizing multimedia and communicatons systems
MICRO 30 Proceedings of the 30th annual ACM/IEEE international symposium on Microarchitecture
Performance of image and video processing with general-purpose processors and media ISA extensions
ISCA '99 Proceedings of the 26th annual international symposium on Computer architecture
Cache performance for multimedia applications
ICS '01 Proceedings of the 15th international conference on Supercomputing
CryptoManiac: a fast flexible architecture for secure communication
ISCA '01 Proceedings of the 28th annual international symposium on Computer architecture
A Reconfigurable multifunction computing cache architecture
IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems
A design space evaluation of grid processor architectures
Proceedings of the 34th annual ACM/IEEE international symposium on Microarchitecture
Implications of Programmable General Purpose Processors for Compression/Encryption Applications
ASAP '02 Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Application-Specific Systems, Architectures, and Processors
Information content of CPU memory referencing behavior
ISCA '77 Proceedings of the 4th annual symposium on Computer architecture
Program balance and its impact on high performance RISC architectures
HPCA '95 Proceedings of the 1st IEEE Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture
Cost-Effective Hardware Acceleration of Multimedia Applications
ICCD '01 Proceedings of the International Conference on Computer Design: VLSI in Computers & Processors
Shade: A Fast Instruction Set Simulator for Execution Profiling
Shade: A Fast Instruction Set Simulator for Execution Profiling
MiBench: A free, commercially representative embedded benchmark suite
WWC '01 Proceedings of the Workload Characterization, 2001. WWC-4. 2001 IEEE International Workshop
CommBench-a telecommunications benchmark for network processors
ISPASS '00 Proceedings of the 2000 IEEE International Symposium on Performance Analysis of Systems and Software
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Compression and encryption applications are important components of modern multimedia workloads. These workloads are typically executed on Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs), Application Specific Processors (ASPs), or General Purpose Processors (GPPs). GPPs are flexible and allow changes in the applications and algorithms better than ASICs and ASPs. However, executing these applications on GPPs is done at a high cost. In this paper, we analyze media compression and encryption applications from the perspective of executing them on a programmable general purpose processor versus ASPs. We select 12 programs from various types of compression and encryption applications. The instruction mix, data types of memory operations, and memory access workloads during the execution of these programs are analyzed. Most of these applications involve processing the data through execution phases (e.g., quantization, encoding, etc.) and temporary results are stored and retrieved between these phases. A metric called overhead memory-access bandwidth per input and output byte is defined to characterize the temporary storage and retrieval of data during execution. We observe that more than 90 percent of the memory accesses made by these programs are temporary data stores and loads arising from the general purpose nature of the execution platform. We also verify the robustness of the proposed metric on different experimental environments using various input data properties and compiler optimizations.