Contemporary Use-Case Analysis on Smartphones

Abstract

Smartphones are fast replacing PCs as the consumer computing devices in terms of usage. Over the last few years smartphone industry has focused enormously on processing hardware. Smartphone CPUs have evolved from simple 32-bit single core to deeply pipelined 64-bit octa-core. Traditionally, benchmarks have been primarily used to showcase the performance benefits of these designs. However, to converge on an optimal design point for a smartphone processor, it is becoming essential to analyse and understand computational requirements of common mobile use cases and how they stress the underlying hardware. While traditional benchmarks are CPU intensive and constantly stress the CPU throughout the execution of the benchmark, but a real mobile application/usecase shows a different trend and requirement. In this work, analysing the effect of real world mobile usecases on smartphone CPU microarchitecture is carried out. The survey conducted by Flurry, states that the mobile users spend 86% of times in apps that include games, social networking app and utilities and rest 14% of browsing. Therefore for this study contains usecases which are right mix of games, browsing and multimedia applications. In this study, classification of different usecases based on their behaviour at processor microarchitecture level is performed. To conduct this study, different development boards were used which contain low and medium end processor. This study also showed the microarchitecture requirement of the usecases in terms of program, control flow and memory behaviour. Second part of these project deals with changing different factors related to heterogeneous architecture and try to optimize battery life without influencing performance in current smartphones. This work used a novel methodology to classify usecase based on their micro-architectural requirement. The study highlighted the maximum IPC and memory bandwidth requirement of a typical mobile usecase. The findings in this analysis will also help in influencing the design of the future smartphone processors.