Application-specific processors for web-browsing: An exploration and evaluation of the design space

The current trend in computing has been to add more and more to the CPU; especially bigger and bigger caches and more cache levels. Based on these observations, we sought to see if bigger is always better. We test this by performing an architectural design space exploration of various cache and frequency configurations for ARM processors. Analyzing the data, we made the surprising discovery that bigger is not always better and we should in fact be taking a step back in the architectural evolutionary roadmap for some applications. In this study, we performed an analysis of the performance of web-browsers versus the architectural configuration and related it to end-user satisfaction. In the end, we were able to determine that a scaled back modern core would not only be sufficient, but improve the performance of the web-browser. In doing this, we have also developed GW-GEM5 a set of tools for the creation, monitoring and analysis of concurrent gem5 simulations on computer clusters for use in design space parameter studies.