Significant advances have been made in compilation technology for capitalizing on instruction-level parallelism (ILP). The vast majority of ILP compilation research has been conducted in the context of general-purpose computing, and more specifically the SPEC benchmark suite. At the same time, a number of microprocessor architectures have emerged which have VLIW and SIMD structures that are well matched to the needs of the ILP compilers. Most of these processors are targeted at embedded applications such as multimedia and communications, rather than general-purpose systems. Conventional wisdom, and a history of hand optimization of inner-loops, suggests that ILP compilation techniques are well suited to these applications. Unfortunately, there currently exists a gap between the compiler community and embedded applications developers. This paper presents MediaBench, a benchmark suite that has been designed to fill this gap. This suite has been constructed through a three-step process: intuition and market driven initial selection, experimental measurement to establish uniqueness, and integration with system synthesis algorithms to establish usefulness.