A performance-oriented use methodology of power optimizing code transformations for multimedia applications realized on programmable multimedia processors

Abstract

The data storage and transfers related power consumption, which forms an important part of the total system power consumption, should be reduced in realizations of multimedia applications on programmable multimedia processors. In earlier work, we have formalized a methodology to achieve this. This methodology is based on the application of a number of power optimizing code transformations to a system-level description of the target application. Our script has recently been extended explicitly to take into consideration the required performance (in number of execution cycles), which is the overriding constraint in real-time multimedia applications. In this paper, we focus on a systematic use methodology that allows to apply this script in practice in a manual way on a complex application, including the necessary local design iterations. Experimental results from a real-life data-dominated application demonstrate that the application of the proposed systematic approach leads to significant power and performance gains compared to reference designs.