Case Studies: Memory Behavior of Multithreaded Multimedia and AI Applications

Memory performance becomes a dominant factor for today’s microprocessor applications. In this paper, we study memory reference behavior of emerging multimedia and AI applications. We compare memory performance for sequential and multithreaded versions of the applications on multithreaded processors. The methodology we used including workload selection and parallelization, benchmarking and measurement, memory trace collection and verification, and tracedriven memory performance simulations. The results from the case studies show that opposite reference behavior, either constructive or disruptive, could be a result for different programs. Care must be taken to make sure the disruptive memory references will not outweigh the benefit of parallelization.