The performance analysis of ARM NEON technology for mobile platforms

초록

Mobile platforms have compute-bound applications, which will be executed on top of ARM processors in many cases. For such applications, the use of the ARM NEON technology should be considered since it can significantly increase the computing power of the underlying processor for vector operations. The ARM NEON technology is a media processing architecture based on SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) that adds instructions targeted primarily for audio, video, and 3-D graphics processing. In this paper, we evaluate the ARM NEON technology in ARM Cortex-A8 processor for several open-source applications. To do this, we use the auto-vectorization feature of the ARM GCC compiler, which is implemented with the NEON technology. The evaluation criteria include program code size, execution time and power consumption, which are crucial in most embedded systems. © 2011 Authors.