Affiliations: Computer Engineering Program, California State
University-Fullerton, Fullerton, CA, USA | Department of Computer Engineering, Rochester
Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY, USA | Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering,
University of Texas, San Antonio, TX, USA
Note: [] Corresponding author: Eugene B. John, Department of Electrical
and Computer Engineering, The University of Texas, San Antonio, TX 78249, USA.
Tel.: +1 210 458 5590; Fax: +1 210 458 5947; E-mail: eugene.john@utsa.edu
Abstract: The analysis and evaluation of the speed performance of personal
computers for various classes of applications continues to be an important area
of research. One such class of applications is that of embedded applications.
Embedded applications such as VOIP, streaming video and image processing
software etc. are used significantly in the personal computer domain. In this
paper, we analyze the execution characteristics of a subset of widely used
embedded applications on a general personal computer based on the Intel Pentium
4 microprocessor. It was observed that, for most of the applications chosen
here, the combination of lower trace cache hit rates and lower L1 cache load
hit rates may have a more adverse impact on the performance of this machine
when compared to other parameters such as L2 cache load hit rates, branch
prediction rates, etc. The overall L2 cache load hit rates, branch prediction
rates and TLB hit rates were found to be fairly high. Hardware improvements
over the trace cache and L1 cache structures of the chosen machine could help
improve performance for many of these applications.
