Memory access pattern analysis and stream cache design for multimedia applications

The memory system is a major performance and power bottleneck in embedded systems especially for multimedia applications. Most multimedia applications access stream type of data structures with regular access patterns. It is observed that conventional caches behave poorly for stream-type data structure. Therefore, prediction-based prefetching techniques have been extensively researched to exploit the regular access patterns. Prefetching, however, may pollute the cache if the prediction is not accurate and needs extra hardware prediction logic. To overcome these problems, we propose a novel hardware prefetching technique that is assisted by static analysis of data access pattern with stream caches. With the proposed stream cache architecture, we could achieve significant performance improvement compared with the conventional cache architecture.