Multimedia workloads versus SPEC CPU2000
Christopher Martinez, Mythri Pinnamaneni, Eugene B John · 2006
With the use of peer-to-peer media sharing, the typical users now have a huge collection of media at their fingertips. Digitized audio and video is becoming the norm to store music, pictures and motion. State of the art computers, especially personal computers are spending a large part of their cycles on workloads performing audio and video encoding and decoding. The SPEC CPU2000 benchmarks are very popularly used in computer design and benchmarking, however, often many raise questions on the representativeness of SPEC benchmarks. Many often suggest that the SPEC CPU programs are some CPU intensive programs and may not be representative of real-world workloads. In this paper, we present a comparison of the performance characteristics of several real-world multimedia programs with execution characteristics of SPEC CPU 2000 programs. Our study finds that the SPEC CPU 2000 benchmarks are very diverse. The execution characteristics of multimedia programs lie well within the range exhibited by SPEC CPU benchmarks.