Video applications on hyper-threading technology

This paper characterizes selected workloads of multimedia applications on current superscalar architectures, and then it characterizes the same workloads on Intel hyper-threading technology. This technology enables multiple threads to run in parallel on a processor, by interleaving instructions from different threads in the pipeline. The workloads, including video encoding, decoding, and watermark detection, are optimized for the Intel Pentium 4 processor. Even if the workloads are very well optimized for the Pentium 4 processor, most of the modules in these well-optimized workloads cannot fully utilize all the execution units available in the microprocessor, due to the inherently sequential constitution of the algorithms. Some of the modules are memory-bounded, while some are computation-bounded. Therefore, hyper-threading technology is a promising architecture feature that allows more CPU resources to be used at a given moment. Our goal is to provide a better explanation of the performance improvements that are possible in multimedia applications using hyper-threading technology. We demonstrate different task partition/scheduling schemes and discuss their trade-offs so that the reader can understand how to develop efficient applications on processors with hyper-threading technology.