Adaptive prefetching for multimedia applications in embedded systems

This paper presents a new and simple prefetching mechanism to improve the memory performance of multimedia applications. This method adapts the memory access mechanism to the access patterns as observed in the application. By doing so, performance is increased, the available resources are better utilized and energy consumption is reduced. Using our prefetch method, we are able to get up to 5.5% IPC improvement, more than 50% cache miss reduction, and up to 4.5% energy reduction. Our mechanism results in better performance for a 2KB data cache than is achievable with an 8KB data cache (without prefetching) for StrongArm SA1110 and Xscale-like processor configurations. This mechanism requires limited hardware resources and generates little additional external bus transfers. This makes this adaptive prefetching well suited for embedded microprocessor systems.