Exploiting Cache in Multimedia

The paper explores cache strategies for multimedia. Although many architectural improvements have been designed for multimedia, the cache structure and the standard caching policies of general-purpose processors exhibit poor performance in exploiting the 2D spatial locality typical of programs handling and processing images. In this paper we propose a novel caching approach suitably tailored to the requirement of multimedia programs. Our proposal exploits hardware pre-fetching for allocating in cache blocks of data that satisfy the 2D spatial locality requirements. Results refer to a benchmark suite of multimedia program including MPEG decoding and image processing programs with different data dependency and access scheme to image data