Performance of commercial multimedia workloads on the Intel Pentium 4: A case study

In this paper, we present a case study of the execution time characteristics of several popular commercial audio and video applications on a state of the art microprocessor, the Intel Pentium 4. The on-chip performance counters on the Pentium 4 processor are used to perform this study using actual real-world workloads. While the Pentium 4 is capable of executing 3–4 instructions in one cycle, it was observed that commercial audio and video applications take between 1.4 and 3.5 cycles (per instruction) to execute. Despite using large caches and sophisticated out of ordering techniques, the average cycles per instruction is higher than a predecessor like Pentium II. This indicates that while clock frequency has improved, real speedups are not scaling. The performance of multimedia programs is compared with execution characteristics of SPEC CPU 2000 programs. Performance impact of branch predictors, caches and trace caches on the Pentium 4 are analyzed for multimedia and SPEC CPU applications.