A bersquare A New Direction for Computer Architecture Research

dvances in integrated circuit technology will soon allow the integration of one billion transistors on a single chip. This is an exciting opportunity for computer architects and designers; their challenge will be to propose microprocessor designs that use this huge transistor budget efficiently and meet the requirements of future applications. The real question is, just what are these future applications? We contend that current computer architecture research continues to have a bias for the past in that it focuses on desktop and server applications. In our view, a different computing domain—personal mobile computing—will play a significant role in driving technology in the next decade. In this paradigm, the basic personal computing and communicating devices will be portable and battery operated, and will support multimedia tasks like speech recognition. These devices will pose a different set of requirements for microprocessors and could redirect the emphasis of computer architecture research.