Moby: A mobile benchmark suite for architectural simulators

Mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets have become the primary consumer computing devices, and their rate of adoption continues to grow. The applications that run on these mobile platforms vary in how they use hardware resources, and their diversity is increasing. Performance and power limitations also vary widely across mobile platforms. Thus there is a growing need for tools to help computer architects design systems to meet the needs of mobile workloads. Full-system simulators are invaluable tools for designing new architectures, but we still need appropriate benchmark suites that capture the behaviors of emerging mobile applications. Current benchmark suites cover only a small range of mobile applications, and many cannot run directly in simulators due to their user interaction requirements. In this paper, we introduce and characterize Moby, a benchmark suite designed to make it easier to use full-system architectural simulators to evaluate microarchitectures for mobile processors. Moby contains popular Android applications, including a web browser, a social networking application, an email client, a music player, a video player, a document processing application, and a map program. To facilitate microarchitectural exploration, we port the Moby benchmark suite to the popular gem5 simulator. We characterize the architecture-independent features of Moby applications on the simulator and analyze the architecture-dependent features on a current-generation mobile platform. Our results show that mobile applications exhibit complex instruction execution behaviors and poor code locality, but current mobile platforms especially instruction-related components cannot meet their requirements.