Slides
You must know that Google Glass is hot; but do you know that it can be so hot that it may melt?
The computer industry is hitting the power and thermal wall: although engineers are still able to stuff more transistors into a single chip, they can hardly keep power and temperature under the existing envelope. This difficulty is most obvious in mobile devices, where the budgets of power and form factor are tight. As a result, users get faster devices with richer graphics as they desire, while suffering from overheating and quick battery drain.
In the next five years, mobile users will demand 10x performance. To avoid melting, mobile devices must embrace heterogeneous hardware. However, hardware heterogeneity challenges the existing software stack. Most notably, extreme heterogeneity removes hardware coherence, thus invalidating the basic assumptions of todays software stack.
In the talk, I will describe the power and thermal difficulty faced in mobile computing, sketch the heterogeneous architectures of modern\ mobile platforms, and introduce K2, our experimental OS for heterogeneous mobile platforms. The source and documentation of K2 are available at www.k2os.org; the work will appear at ASPLOS'14.