Investigating the impact of multimedia applications on multicore cache memory subsystems

Multicore cache memory subsystems are gaining increasing importance in designing multimedia systems to support real-time applications. Future multimedia systems are expected to have several hundred, if not several thousand or more, processing cores to improve performance/power ratio. Multilevel caches in a multicore architecture require huge amount of power and may decrease processing speed and timing predictability due to cache´s dynamic behavior. In this work, we investigate the impact of multimedia applications on multicore cache memory subsystem using Miss Table (MT). MT holds information about the memory blocks those might cause more cache misses (if not locked). Cache locking algorithm and cache replacement scheme can directly be benefited by using the information stored in MT. We simulate a quad-core system with two-level cache memory subsystem using MPEG4, H.264/AVC, FFT, and MI workload. Experimental results show that the addition of the MT reduces mean delay per task and total power consumption by 26% and 35%, respectively.