New Schemes of Cache Memory for Multimedia Applications

Abstract

A recent confluence of hardware and software technologies has given computers the ability to process dynamic media data. Multimedia workloads such as MPEG-2 video player, 3D graphics and animations will occupy a large portion of the computer workload. While the processor speed increases rapidly, the required memory bandwidth for multimedia workloads is more critical than that for desktop workloads. This paper will focus on strengthening the memory system to suit multimedia workloads. Then, the Split Data Cache scheme that divides data cache into two parts (Stride and non-Stride) to makes better use of the spatial locality is proposed to enhance performance. The result shows that by adopting the Split Data Cache scheme, the miss rate can be reduced to 82%~87% of a conventional data cache. To further improve the performance, an Assisted Stream Buffer is proposed to hide the latency by prefetching data between the Stride data cache and the second level cache. By using the Stride History Table information, the Assisted Stream Buffer can yield an average hit ratio of 77.8%, with 12.5% extra bandwidth