Investigating The Utility of MMX/SSE Instruction Sets Now And In The Future
Abstract:
In this report we examine several multimedia applications with and without MMX/SSE enhancements and examine the impact on execution time and cache performance of these enhancements. We implement several versions of the programs to isolate their memory and processing requirements.One criticism of SIMD technology is that it may be doomed to obsolesence as processors gain speed with respect to memory. We discover that the multimedia applications we looked at are not memory bound. Enhancing applications with MMX does make them more memory bound, but not so much as to nullify the gain given by the enhancement. We show that prefetching instructions can be used to hide memory latency, and that MMX style enhancement will still be useful as long as the latency is predictable, the memory bandwidth scales sufficiently, and the total runtime of the program is large compared to the latency of memory. 1 Introduction and Previous Work Our first goal is to test the ability of MMX and SSE to improve the performance of multimedia applications. In this paper, we compare enhanced and unenhanced versions of a wide variety of applications, representative of important multimedia workloads both today and in the future. There has been some work in this area, but there are still many unexplored avenues. In particular, Bhargava et. al
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