  Vector processing has become commonplace in today's CPU microarchitectures.
Vector instructions improve performance and energy which is crucial for
resource-constraint mobile devices. The research community currently lacks a
comprehensive benchmark suite to study the benefits of vector processing for
mobile devices. This paper presents Swan-an extensive vector processing
benchmark suite for mobile applications. Swan consists of a diverse set of
data-parallel workloads from four commonly used mobile applications: operating
system, web browser, audio/video messaging application, and PDF rendering
engine. Using Swan benchmark suite, we conduct a detailed analysis of the
performance, power, and energy consumption of vectorized workloads, and show
that: (a) Vectorized kernels increase the pressure on cache hierarchy due to
the higher rate of memory requests. (b) Vector processing is more beneficial
for workloads with lower precision operations and higher cache hit rates. (c)
Limited Instruction-Level Parallelism and strided memory accesses to
multi-dimensional data structures prevent vector processing benefits from
scaling with more SIMD functional units and wider registers. (d) Despite lower
computation throughput than domain-specific accelerators, such as GPU, vector
processing outperforms these accelerators for kernels with lower operation
counts. Finally, we show five common computation patterns in mobile
data-parallel workloads that dominate the execution time.
