Research And Analysis On Program Characteristics Of Multimedia Applications And Improvement Of Architecture

In recent years, the multimedia industry has been growing at a tremendous rate. The proliferation of the Internet has pushed multimedia into mainstream computing. Multimedia workloads have occupied nearly 90% of the computing cycles in most personal computers. The processing and computing demands for multimedia applications are also escalating rapidly. However, the research on computer architecture design becomes the key factor in order to accelerate multimedia applications. It becomes a hot research direction to explore architecture techniques to meet the processing and computing demands for multimedia applications according to multimedia program characteristics and performance analysis.Firstly, this paper analyzes some achievements on the current research of multimedia characteristics and architectural techniques. Secondly, we introduce MediaBench and some tools for program tests, and design a new program analysis tool, PCA (program character analyzer). Furthermore, we amend SimpleScalar2.0 for program tests. Thirdly, this paper makes some new tests and analysis on MediaBench that has typical multimedia program characteristics in macroscopic and microcosmic fields. Then based on the understanding on multimedia program and loop characteristics, this paper brings forward a new computing model, a Cache model, and some new architectural techniques and schemes to accelerate multimedia applications and program loop. At last, we introduce a new type of architecture model, LEAP (Loop Engine on Array Processors), and simply probe into the characteristics and parallelism of common programs loop.