“UC San Diego researchers have struck upon a novel idea that could make Android phones 11 times more efficient than they are currently: a custom-tailored processor that is optimized to run the most widely used apps on a given phone. Their GreenDroid chip might not only lead to better battery life in Android smartphones, but could help circumvent a fundamental problem in chip design that would otherwise soon become a major problem for chip efficiency in mobile devices.
Their design is pretty simple: take the main core of a phone’s processor and surround it with 120 smaller cores. Using a software the UCSD team designed, they figure the computational demands of the most popular apps on Android OS--things like email, maps, the camera, Pandora, etc.--and each core’s circuitry is tailored to mimic the code of the specific app it will be running. “
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