A Systematic Approach to Reduce the System Bus Load and Power in Multimedia Algorithms

Multimedia algorithms deal with enormous amounts of data transfers and storage, resulting in huge bandwidth requirements at the off-chip memory and system bus level. As a result the related energy consumption becomes critical. Even for execution time the bottleneck can shift from the CPU to the external bus load. This paper demonstrates a systematic software approach to reduce this system bus load. It consists of source-to-source code transformations, that have to be applied before the conventional ILP compilation. To illustrate this we use a cavity detection algorithm for medical imaging, that is mapped on an Intel Pentium® II processor