Architectural characterization and analysis of high-end mobile client workloads

With the rapid development of hardware and software technologies, mobile client platforms now run a vast diversity of applications, catering to the needs of various end users. In this paper, we conduct an extensive investigation and analysis of multiple representative high-end mobile client workloads, to shed lights on the workload characterization and the interaction between the application/software and the platform/processor behaviors. Our measurement and analysis provide a deep understanding on the architectural characterization of those mobile workloads. For example, we find that the today´s mobile processors, while performing well with traditional client workloads, exhibit some inefficiency with certain emerging less CPU-intensive workloads such as casual games. The analysis and insights we gained can be used to guide future design of not only the hardware such as the micro-architecture design, but also the software stack and application development, in order to achieve both high performance and energy efficiency.