Application Profiling in a Dual-Core Platform

Open Multimedia Application Platforms (OMAP), such as 161x and 2420, are dual core processors with an Advanced Risk Machine (ARM) and a fixed-point Digital Signal Processor (DSP). The decision of issuing or not part of an application to be executed by the DSP core must be carefully made, because of both, the additional complexity related to the design process, and the time overhead involved with control and data transfer between the ARM and the DSP. In this paper, we introduce a methodology to assess the performance of applications which use both cores. The results of the profiling might be applied to help designers map applications to the platform cores.