Exploiting cache in multimedia

The paper explores cache strategies for multimedia. Although many architectural improvements have been designed for multimedia, the cache structure and the standard caching policies of general-purpose processors exhibit poor performance in exploiting the 2D spatial locality typical of programs handling and processing images. We propose a novel caching approach, suitably tailored to the requirement of multimedia programs. Our proposal exploits hardware pre-fetching for allocating in cache, blocks of data that satisfy the 2D spatial locality requirements. Results refer to a benchmark suite of multimedia programs including MPEG decoding and image processing programs with different data dependency and access schemes to image data.