Evaluating Power Efficient Data-Reuse Decisions For Embedded Multimedia Applications: An Analytical Approach

Power consumption of multimedia applications executing on embedded cores is heavily dependent on data transfers between system memory and processing units. The purpose of this paper is to extend an existing power optimizing methodology based on data-reuse decisions, in order to determine the optimal solution in a rapid and reliable way. An analytical approach is proposed by extracting expressions for the number of accesses to each memory layer. Moreover, the design space is further reduced since these analytical expressions are calculated only for a subset of all transformations. The results concerning the power efficiency of data-reuse transformations are in agreement to those in previous studies. However, the exploration time of the design space is significantly reduced. The proposed methodology is also applied t o the case of multiple parallel processing cores, proving that the relative effect of each transformation is independent on the number of processors and the applied memory architecture.