Cache performance for multimedia applications

Abstract

The caching behavior of multimedia applications has been described as having high instruction reference locality within small loops, very large working sets, and poor data cache performance due to non-locality of data references. Despite this, there is no published research deriving or measuring these qualities. Utilizing the previously developed Berkeley Multimedia Workload, we present the results of execution driven cache simulations with the goal of aiding furore media processing architecture design. Our analysis examines the differences between multimedia and traditional applications in cache behavior. We find that multimedia applications actually exhibit lower instruction miss ratios and comparable data miss ratios when contrasted with other widely studied workloads. In addition, we find that longer data cache line sizes than are currently used would benefit multimedia processing.