Characterizing the Unique and Diverse Behaviors in Existing and Emerging General-Purpose and Domain-Specific Benchmark Suites

Characterizing and understanding emerging workload behavior is of vital importance to ensure next generation microprocessors perform well on their anticipated future workloads. This paper compares a number of benchmark suites from emerging application domains, such as bio-informatics (BioPerf), biometrics (BioMetricsWorkload) and multimedia (MediaBench II), against general-purpose workloads represented by SPEC CPU2000 and CPU2006. Although these benchmark suites have been characterized before, prior work did not capture the benchmark suites' inherent (microarchitecture-independent) behavior, nor did they provide a phase-level characterization.