Exploring the Design Space for Android Smartphones

Abstract

Designing a smartphone system can be a challenging task since it contains complex hardware and software components. The design space of an Android smartphone is very large as it spans over many hardware parameters such as the processor pipeline, cache configurations, memory capacity, as well as software configurations and tunables in the operating system, middleware, and applications. It is desirable to have a set of design space exploration (DSE) tools which can be used to find good design points in such a large space. However, traditional architectural simulation tools are too slow to explore the design space in a timely fashion. To facilitate DSE for Android smartphones, we proposed a framework, called ADSET, which adopt a fast full-system modeling technique and a parallel DSE method to concurrently evaluate multiple design points. In this paper, we explain the framework in details and evaluate the effectiveness of ADSET in finding good designs in a large design space.