Pattern-driven prefetching for multimedia applications on embedded processors

Multimedia applications in general and video processing, such as the MPEG4 Visual stream decoders, in particular are increasingly popular and important workloads for future embedded systems. Due to the high computational requirements, the need for low power, high performance embedded processors for multimedia applications is growing very fast. This paper proposes a new data prefetch mechanism called pattern-driven prefetching. PDP inspects the sequence of data cache misses and detects recurring patterns within that sequence. The patterns that are observed are based on the notions of the inter-miss stride (memory address stride between two misses) and the inter-miss interval (number of cycles between two misses). According to the patterns being detected, PDP initiates prefetch actions to anticipate future accesses and hide memory access latencies. PDP includes a simple yet effective stop criterion to avoid cache pollution and to reduce the number of additional memory accesses. The addi...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2006
• Where: JSA
• Authors: Hassan Sbeyti, Smaïl Niar, Lieven Eeckhout
• Keywords: Embedded Systems, JSA 2006, Multimedia Applications, Visual Stream Decoders