A prefetch-aware memory system for data access patterns in multimedia applications
Tareq A. Alawneh, Ahmed Elhossini · 2018
As the speed gap between CPU and external memory widens, memory latency has become the dominant performance bottleneck in modern applications. Closely connected are caches which play an important role in reducing the average memory latency. The way data is accessed strongly influences cache performance. Numerous multimedia algorithms operating on data such as images and videos, perform processing over rectangular regions of pixels. If this and other data access patterns are properly exploited, significant performance improvements can be achieved. This paper proposes a prefetch-aware memory system that exploits 2D, stride and sequential data access patterns in multimedia applications. It aims at reducing the average memory access latency, lowering the number of memory accesses and utilizing the bandwidth efficiently. Our results reveal significant average memory access time (AMAT) reduction of 21.2% when utilizing effectively the proposed approach compared to the baseline in the evaluated workloads.