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.