Execution characteristics of multimedia applications on a Pentium II processor

With the widespread use of 3D graphics, animation, speech recognition, and other media applications, general-purpose processors are increasingly spending their cycles on video and audio processing. However, the characteristics of media applications when executed on general purpose processors are not well understood. Such knowledge is extremely important in guiding the design of future microprocessors and development of media applications. In this paper we characterize the performance of multimedia applications on art Intel Pentium II processor based system. Six different commercial multimedia applications belonging to 3D graphics, streaming video or streaming audio categories are executed on an Intel Pentium II processor and performance is measured. Architectural data pertaining to utilization of various hardware resources on the chip are collected using on-chip performance monitoring counters. Multimedia applications are seen to have fewer branch instructions than SPECint benchmarks, however more than SPECfp benchmarks. Despite a regular control flow and more available parallelism, the average number of cycles taken to execute an instruction is seen to be higher than that of SPECint. In many aspects, media applications exhibit a behavior between that of SPECint and SPECfp.