Low Power Mobile Operating Systems With Profiling Hardware Acceleration
Xinwei Niu · i-manager’s Journal on Software Engineering · 2011
According to the ITRS road map [1] and the continuation of Moore's Law [2] , the number of transistors on a chip will continue to increase for at least another decade. In order to benefit from the growing integrated chip, engineers have developed a new technique to manage the increased complexity in large chips, called System-on-a-Chip (SoC). SoC refers to integrating all components of a computer or other electronic systems into a single integrated circuit [3] . Bandwidth is a very critical parameter in the SoC system level design. For a balanced bandwidth design, people need to consider not only the heat dissipation and power consumption but also maximum throughput of the whole system any welldesigned SoC system must consider any possible balance-breaking aspect which may lead to system architecture re-design and increased costs [4, 5] . Modern embedded computer systems have grown rapidly due to the increasing capability of processing power while the hardware circuits are still kept in a small size. These systems have become more important in our daily lives especially in mobile communication and operating systems, such as cell phones, game consoles, as well as some larger-scale design of sophisticated products, for example; cars, medical instruments, space shuttle, etc. In order to meet the requirements of shorter response time and faster processing speed, people begin to study how to get more speedup and less energy consumption by analyzing the data of the embedded c o m p u t e r s y s t e m, t h u s p r o m o t e t h e s y s t e m performance. People always want to run the applications as fast as possible but modern processors cannot always gain the performance improvement by only increasing the frequency of the CPU. Even with the multi-processor architecture, some sophisticated applications requiring huge data calculation still cannot meet expectations because software applications written in high level