Performance Analysis of Embedded Applications on a Pentium-4 Based Machine

Abstract – As embedded applications find widespread use in the PC domain, there arises a need to study their performance on such systems. Although hardware characterization and performance of embedded systems has been widely researched and continues to be so, the performance of general-purpose personal computing systems while running embedded applications has not been widely reported hitherto. This paper makes an attempt to examine the performance of a subset of widely used embedded applications on a general purpose Intel Pentium 4 based personal computer. In general, these benchmarks returned high CPI values. Some of them also experienced high rates of trace cache and L1 cache miss rates. However, the L2 hit ratio and the branch prediction rates were fairly high thus implying smaller and repetitive working sets. Keywords: Embedded, Performance Analysis. 1