A data access prediction unit for multimedia applications

A large number of algorithms, which work on multimedia data, such as images and videos, perform data processing over rectangular regions of pixels. If this distinctive data access and other data accesses are exploited properly, it can yield significant application performance improvements. For the purpose of achieving efficient exploitation for these data accesses, their information should be monitored and detected at runtime. For this purpose, we propose a data access prediction unit for multimedia applications. Our simulation results reveal that the accuracy of predicting the data access information achieved by the proposed unit is, on average, 87.4%, for the evaluated workloads, when the proposed unit utilizes a history table with 64 entries.