Scalability of Multimedia Applications on Next-Generation Processors

In the near future, the majority of personal computers are expected to have several processing units. This is referred to as core multiprocessing (CMP). Furthermore, each of the computation units will be capable of running multiple hardware threads. To benefit from the additional processing power, application developers should multithread their software. This paper studies the scalability (expected speedup factor) of multimedia applications and provides guidelines for proper utilization of these new multi-core platforms. In particular, we discuss the decomposition method, load balancing, synchronization primitives, interaction with the operating system and hardware issues such as cache hierarchy and memory bandwidth. Our results are based on analysis of several state-of-the-art applications, including H.264 video encoding, panoramic image stitching and dense optical-flow estimation. We demonstrate how to multithread them properly, and report scalability results on several next-generation multi-core platforms