Execution characteristics of embedded applications on a Pentium 4-based personal computer

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.