Access-Pattern-Aware On-Chip Memory Allocation for SIMD Processors

The number of cycles for each external memory access in Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) processors is heavily affected by the access pattern, such as aligned, unaligned, or stride. We developed a high-performance dynamic on-chip memory-allocation method for SIMD processors by considering the memory access pattern as well as the access frequency. The access pattern and the access count for an array of a loop are determined by both code analysis and profiling, which are performed on a developed compiler framework. This framework not only conducts dynamic on-chip memory allocation but also generates optimized codes for a target processor. The proposed allocation method has been tested with several multimedia benchmarks including motion estimation, 2-D discrete cosine transform, and MPEG2 encoder programs.