Summary: To appear in Proceedings of the 28th International Symposium on Computer Architecture, June 2001
Variability in the Execution of Multimedia Applications
and Implications for Architecture 
Christopher J. Hughes, Praful Kaul y , Sarita V. Adve, Rohit Jain, Chanik Park z , and Jayanth Srinivasan
Dept. of Computer Science y Transmeta Corporation z Dept. of Computer
University of Illinois pkaul@transmeta.com Science and Engineering
at Urbana­Champaign Seoul National University
rsim@cs.uiuc.edu park@iris.snu.ac.kr
Abstract
Multimedia applications are an increasingly important
workload for general­purpose processors. This paper an­
alyzes frame­level execution time variability for several
multimedia applications on general­purpose architectures.
There are two reasons for such an analysis. First, it has
been conjectured that complex features of such architec­
tures (e.g., out­of­order issue) result in unpredictable exe­
cution times, making them unsuitable for meeting real­time
requirements of multimedia applications. Our analysis tests
this conjecture. Second, such an analysis can be used to ef­
fectively employ recently proposed adaptive architectures.

Source: Adve, Sarita - Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Collections: Computer Technologies and Information Sciences