Power exploration of parallel embedded architectures implementing data-reuse transformations

Efficient use of data-reuse transformations combined with a custom memory hierarchy that exploits the temporal locality of data related memory accesses can have a significant impact on system power consumption, especially in data dominated applications e.g. multimedia processing. In this paper the effect of data-reuse decisions on power consumption, area and performance of multimedia applications implemented on uni- and dual-processor embedded cores is explored. By this work it is clarified that conclusions for the transformations effect on multi-processor architectures can be extracted by the corresponding effect on the uniprocessor architecture. In this way the exploration space can be significantly reduced. A motion estimation algorithm, namely the two-dimensional logarithmic search, and a discrete cosine transform (DCT) algorithm are used as demonstrator applications.