Greendroid: Exploring the next evolution in smartphone application processors

Mobile application processors are soon to replace desktop processors as the focus of innovation in microprocessor technology. Already, these processors have largely caught up to their more power hungry cousins, supporting out-oforder execution and multicore processing. In the near future, the exponentially worsening problem of dark silicon is going to be the primary force that dictates the evolution of these designs. In recent work, we have argued that the natural evolution of mobile application processors is to use this dark silicon to create hundreds of automatically generated energy-saving cores, called conservation cores, which can reduce energy consumption by an order of magnitude. This article describes GreenDroid, a research prototype that demonstrates the use of such cores to save energy broadly across the hotspots in the Android mobile phone software stack.