Computational Sprinting To Provide Bursts Of Smartphone Peak Power

University of Pennsylvania and University of Michigan developers are pushing smartphones in order to extract the best possible performance even if so for a brief period of time. The concept is known as 'Computational Sprinting' emulating the performance of a sprinter who runs fast for a short distance. This new approach might prove to be a groundbreaking concept in context of smartphone power and cooling. The paper was presented on Feb. 28 at the International Symposium on #-Link-Snipped-# Architecture in New Orleans.

No more do the Smartphones benefit from increased transistor density and the steady advance of computer chips, mainly so because they are rendered incapable of managing the heat that transistors produce. The heat has to be regulated out so as to not burn the chip, but smaller devices cannot afford large fans to preserve such functionality. Conclusively, only a few Smartphone chips can operate at once.

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Smartphones are made in a way to sustain performance over long periods of time but this hinders the application of multimedia systems which need a lot of horsepower to run. In the paper, the researchers have explored the existence of a chip which could run 16 times the sustainable rate of an average chip but only for a short period of time, without burning the chip itself. The idea has been realized through the concept of 'Computational Sprinting.'

Computational Sprinting would also solve the dark silicon problem to a great extent by taking into consideration the specialized operation of mobile devices. Computational Sprinting depends heavily on the idle time of a Smartphone to cool off and recover after performing "bursty" tasks such as image recognition tasks, building panoramas out of individual photos, finding navigation routes or doing speech recognition.

Up to 15 additional cores are devised so as to work in parallel alongside the chip's main core for up to one second accelerating device's response time tenfold. To handle the issue of higher temperatures, the researchers have proposed a heat-spreading structure that incorporates an encapsulated phase change material which would help in absorbing heat by melting during the sprint, followed by slowly dissipating it by hardening while the device is idle.

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