Instruction Fetch Characteristics of Media Processing

This paper presents the results of a quantitative evaluation of the instruction fetch characteristics for media processing. It is commonly known that multimedia applications typically exhibit a significant degree of processing regularity. Prior studies have examined this processing regularity and qualitatively noted that in contrast with general-purpose applications, which tend to retain their data on-chip and stream program instructions in from off-chip, media processing applications are exactly the opposite, retaining their instruction code on-chip and commonly streaming data in from offchip. This study expounds on this prior work and quantitatively validates their conclusions, while also providing recommendations on architectural methods that can enable more effective and affordable support for instruction fetching in media processing.