Impact of Webpage Access on the Design of Single-Chip Heterogeneous Multiprocessors

Abstract

Mobile devices are currently designed similar to embedded systems where performance is derived from a specification that allows the device to interact in a periodic manner with the environment. However, as mobile devices increasingly interact with the Internet they exhibit a different style of computing that does not fit the embedded system model. At the same time, a mobile device designer needs to consider many different issues such as the number and types of processors, scheduling strategies, applications, power consumption, and dimensions of the device, which increase the total number of design decisions at an alarming rate. This research shows that by using a more realistic model of mobile devices using webpage-based benchmarks, customization can allow specialized architectures to improve performance up to 70 percent over a homogeneous multiprocessor composed of general purpose processors and 25 percent additional improvement over the next best architecture when individual user preferences were also considered. Webpage access, to include user profiling for individual utilization, is clearly a significant factor in the design of mobile devices — and thus should be included in future benchmarks based upon webpage content and webpage access patterns. When new evaluation techniques are developed, new design strategies can be discovered and employed.