Recon.gurable ALU Array (RAA) architectures-representing a popular class of Coarse-grained Recon.gurable Architectures-are gaining in popularity especially for media applications due to their .exibility, regularity, and ef.ciency. In such architectures, memory is critical not only for con.guration data but also for the heavy data traf.c required by the application. Hence, system designers would like to evaluate the effects of different memory architectures and memory traf.c early in the design process. In this paper, we offer a scheme for system designers to quickly estimate the performance of media applications on RAA architectures. The proposed scheme is based on the performance-oriented model of RAA architectures, which we develop to model different memory architectures in a uniform way so as to allow for easy mapping of application loops and early performance estimation. Our experimental results estimating the performance of multimedia applications on three memory architectures demonstrate the .exibility of our memory architecture evaluation scheme as well as the varying effects of the memory architectures on the application performance, which also signi.es the need for memory architecture evaluation early in the design process.