Identifying "representative" workloads in designing MpSoC platforms for media processing

Workload design is a well recognized problem in the domain of microprocessor design. Different program characteristics that influence the selection of a representative workload include microarchitecture-centric properties such as cache miss rates, instruction mix and accuracy of branch prediction. However, properties of a workload that are pertinent to the context of system-level design of multiprocessor SoC platforms are very different. Till date, the problem of "representative workload design" in this specific context has not been sufficiently addressed. This work represents an attempt to address this problem in the specific case of SoC platform design for multimedia processing. Towards this, we present a method to characterize properties of multimedia workload that are relevant to SoC platform design. Based on such a characterization, we present a technique for classifying different multimedia streams. Finally, we show the utility of such a classification through a case study involving the design of a multiprocessor SoC platform for MPEG-2 decoding.