In the near future, media processing applications are expected to become one of the dominant computing workloads.
Several considerations argue for the use of general-purpose systems for such applications.
This talk will discuss some of our recent work in the area of general-purpose architectures for media processing as well as future directions. In spite of the large amount of recent attention given to media processing, there has been very little quantitative understanding of the performance of such applications on general-purpose architectures. The first part of the talk attempts to develop such an understanding to determine if and how we need to change the design of general-purpose systems to support media applications. The memory behavior of the benchmarks makes large caches generally ineffective, but software prefetching can often be used to substantially improve memory performance. The second part of the talk uses the above results.