Trends in microprocessors of increasing die size and clock speed and decreasing feature sizes have fueled rapidly increasing performance. However, the limited improvements in DRAM latency and bandwidth and diminishing returns of increasing superscalar ILP and cache sizes have led to the proposal of new microprocessor architectures that implement processorin-memory, stream processing, and tiled processing. Each architecture is typically evaluated separately and compared to a baseline

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... . In this paper, we evaluate the performance of processors that implement these architectures on a common set of signal processing kernels. The implementation results are compared with the measured performance of a conventional system based on the PowerPC with Altivec. The results show that these new processors show significant improvements over conventional systems and that each architecture has its own strengths and weaknesses. VIRAM, IMAGINE, and RAW In this section, the VIRAM, Imagine, and Raw chips are briefly described. We also describe the performance models that will be used to understand performance of the application kernels.