Toolbox for exploration of energy-efficient event processors for human-computer interaction

The advent of high speed input sensor and display technologies and the drive for faster interactive response suggests that human-computer interaction (HCI) task processing deadlines of a few milliseconds or less may be required in future handheld devices. At the same time, users will expect the same, if not better, battery life than today's devices under these more stringent response requirements. In this paper, we present a toolbox for exploring the design space of HCI event processors. We first describe the simulation platform for interactive environments that runs mobile user interface code with inputs recorded from human users. We validate it against a hardware platform from prior work. Given system-level constraints on latency, we demonstrate how this toolbox can be used to design a custom heterogeneous event processor that maximizes battery life. We show that our toolbox can pick design points that are 1.5-2.5× more energy-efficient than general-purpose big. LITTLE architectures.

I. Introduction

Computer systems have evolved from batch systems, to personal computers, to the present day proliferation of handheld devices such as cell phones, tablets, and eReaders. Mobile devices have evolved into high performance devices used for a wide range of everyday activities with compute components were once scaled-down versions of personal computers.