Exploring Speculative Procedure Level Parallelism from Multimedia Applications

Multimedia applications are fast becoming one of the dominating workloads for modern computer systems. How to make use of multicore computing resources to accelerate multimedia applications has become a common concern problem. However, potential speculative procedure level parallelism in multimedia applications has not yet been explored thoroughly. This paper proposes a procedure level speculation architecture for accelerating multimedia applications, including its speculative mechanism and analysis method. It also takes several applications from Media bench to analyze their coverage parallelism, thread size, inter-thread data dependence feature and potential speedup. The experimental results show that: (1) the best adpcm application can get a 12.2x speedup in procedure level speculation, (2) limited parallelism coverage and severe inter-thread data dependence violations badly affect speculative procedure level parallelism in some multimedia applications.