Hardware prefetching techniques for cache memories in multimedia applications

The workload of multimedia applications has a strong impact on cache memory performance, since the locality of memory references embedded in multimedia programs differs from that of traditional programs. In many cases, standard cache memory organization achieves poorer performance when used for multimedia. A widely explored approach to improve cache performance is hardware prefetching that allows the pre-loading of data in the cache before they are referenced. However, existing hardware prefetching approaches partially miss the potential performance improvement, since they are not tailored to multimedia locality. In this paper we propose novel effective approaches to hardware prefetching to be used in image processing programs for multimedia. Experimental results are reported for a suite of multimedia image processing programs including convolutions with kernels, MPEG-2 decoding, and edge chain coding.