Architectural characterization and analysis of high-end mobile client workloads

摘要

With the rapid development of hardware and software technologies, mobile client platforms now run a vast diversity of applications, catering to the needs of various end users. In this paper, we conduct an extensive investigation and analysis of multiple representative high-end mobile client workloads, to shed lights on the workload characterization and the interaction between the application/software and the platform/processor behaviors. Our measurement and analysis provide a deep understanding on the architectural characterization of those mobile workloads. For example, we find that the today's mobile processors, while performing well with traditional client workloads, exhibit some inefficiency with certain emerging less CPU-intensive workloads such as casual games. The analysis and insights we gained can be used to guide future design of not only the hardware such as the micro-architecture design, but also the software stack and application development, in order to achieve both high performance and energy efficiency.