Asymmetric cores for low power user interface systems

Abstract

In recent years, advances in hardware design have lead to significant improvements in the battery life of everyday information appliances. In particular, application processors increasingly include low power "helper" cores dedicated to simpler tasks. Using a custom board design, Guimbretière et al. [2], demonstrated that such helper cores can also be used to execute simple user interface tasks. We revisit their approach by implementing a similar system on an off-the-shelf application processor (TI OMAP4), and demonstrate that, in many cases, the gains reported by Guimbretière et al. [2], can be achieved by simply having the helper core dispatch input events. This new approach can be implemented by merely changing the toolkit infrastructure, thus greatly simplifying deployment