Data reuse analysis technique for software-controlled memory hierarchies

In multimedia and other streaming applications a significant portion of energy is spent on data transfers. Exploiting data reuse opportunities in the application, we can reduce this energy by making copies of frequently used data in a small local memory and replacing speed and power inefficient transfers from main off-chip memory by more efficient local data transfers. In this paper we present an automated approach for analyzing these opportunities in a program that allows modification of the program to use custom scratch pad memory configurations comprising a hierarchical set of buffers for local storage of frequently reused data. Using our approach we are able to reduce energy consumption of the memory subsystem when using a scratch pad memory by a factor of two on average compare to a cache of the same size.