IEEE ANDROID PROJECTS BANGLORE
EVALUATING ASYMMETRIC MULTIPROCESSING FOR MOBILE APPLICATIONS
Mobile workloads have diverse performance requirements. Some involve frequent user inputs and are computationally intensive while others are a background service that minimally uses system resources. To exploit this diversity, architects propose asymmetric multiprocessing (AMP), which achieves both performance and energy efficiency by dynamically switching between high-performance and low-power cores. However, the benefits of existing AMPs that share main memory are limited by the high costs of switching between execution modes. Existing AMP architectures can exploit inter-application diversity but fail to exploit intra-application diversity. Exploiting the latter requires emerging AMP architectures that share the cache hierarchy and reduce switch latency by orders of magnitude. To explore the AMP design space, we propose a set of realistic mobile benchmarks on Android that consider user actions and inputs. We simulate the benchmarks and show that mobile apps benefit substantially from responsive AMPs that switch quickly to exploit fine-grained microphases.