The Architecture of Smart Phones

Summary form only given. The growth of the smart-phone market has been phenomenal. I don´t need to quote exact numbers, which are in the hundreds of millions, to illustrate their ubiquity - most of us have a smart-phone in our pocket. The design constraints on smart phones are among the most challenging in computing: 1) low power to preserve battery life; 2) base-band processors to support 4G data rates (100 Mbs - moving to 1Gbs for 5G); 3) multicore application processors for ever more sophisticated applications; and 4) time-to-market constraints that often result in solutions that seem ad hoc at best. Smart phones have become by far the most important of today´s computing platforms. Oddly, the computer architecture community has been slow to recognize this. There are only an handful of published studies that attempt to provide an architectural perspective. This talk will review the current state of the architecture of mobile phone platforms, and present some initial studies that the author and his research group have conducted on existing systems. Suggestions for future research and future architectures will be presented.