Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
Large data centers, and
data intensive
High performance
Low power
Low energy
General purpose, and
multimedia
Reliability, and
battery−supplied
Smartphones, and
mobile multimedia
Wireless Sensor Networks
Fig. 6.3
Application domains are mapped to their respective design requirements. According to the
required power/performance ratio, we can detect several application domains, in both the mobile
and non-mobile case
Without any loss in generality, we can point out two main broad classes:
high
performance
and
low power
. High performance encloses all applications for which
high operating frequency and high throughput are experienced, while low-power
applications are those for which energy budgeting is of major importance. Notice
that speaking of “power” or “energy” is not the same, and the use of one or other
term relies on the target application scenario. Refer to Sect.
6.4
for a more detailed
discussion on this distinction. In conjunction, technology and design advances lead to
a proliferation of mobile embedded systems, for which several additional challenges
raise up. The combination of the aforementioned requirements and the application
platforms (i.e., mobile against non-mobile), gives us free room for a simple yet
comprehensive classification of the interested scenarios in the MPSoC domain. This
fact is graphically shown in Fig.
6.3
.
Five slightly different domains have been detected. General high-performance ap-
plications comprise both mobile and non-mobile domains. In the non-mobile case,
for instance, we can find desktop personal computers, where the user experience
from the performance view-point is of utmost importance; along with those require-
ments, such applications are mainly general purpose, meaning that they are designed
for a wide spectrum of jobs, without precise optimization of power or energy as-
pects. Nevertheless, it is true that there exist cases in which high performance and
low power are a common goal, as in systems collecting sensible data, such as large
data centers; in this case the peak power has to be minimized, in order to reduce
cooling costs, increase system reliability, and decrease device failure rate. General
low-power operations are required by almost all mobile embedded systems, but dif-
ferent approaches should be taken while considering high performance and energy
Search WWH ::
Custom Search