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Abstract: This paper we suggest a different transistors in a single chip [1]. This exciting
opportunity presents computer architects and designers
computing environment as a worthy new direction for
with the challenging problem of proposing
computer architecture research: personal mobile
microprocessor organizations able to utilize this huge
computing, where portable devices are used for visual
transistor budget efficiently and meet the requirements
computing and personal communications tasks. Such a
of future applications. To ad-dress this challenge a
device supports in an integrated fashion all the
special issue on Billion Transistor Architectures [2]
functions provided to-day by a portable computer, a
in September 1997. The first three articles of the is-sue
cellular phone, a digital camera and a video game. The
discussed problems and trends that will affect future
requirements placed on the processor in this
processor design, while seven articles from academic
environment are energy efficiency, high performance
research groups proposed microprocessor architectures
for multimedia and DSP functions, and area efficient,
and implementations for billion transistor chips. These
scalable designs. We examine the architectures that
proposals covered a wide architecture space, ranging
were recently pro-posed for billion transistor
from out-of-order designs to reconfigurable systems.
microprocessors. While they are very promising for
In addition to the academic proposals, Intel and
the stationary desktop and server workloads, we
Hewlett-Packard presented the basic characteristics of
discover that most of them are un-able to meet the
their next generation IA-64 architecture [3], which is
challenges of the new environment and provide the
expected to dominate the high-performance processor
necessary enhancements for multimedia applications
market within a few years.
running on portable devices.
It is no surprise that the focus of these proposals is the
Keywords: Journalism, professional identity, social computing domain that has shaped processor
media, Twitter, verification architecture for the past decade: the uniprocessor
desktop running technical and scientific applications,
and the multiprocessor server used for transaction
processing and file-system workloads. We start with a
1. INTRODUCTION review of these proposals and a qualitative evaluation
Advances in integrated circuits technology will soon of them for the concerns of this classic computing
provide the capability to integrate one billion environment.