Y. Zhu, A. Srikanth, J. Leng, and V. J. Reddi, “
Exploiting Webpage Characteristics for Energy-Efficient Mobile Web Browsing,”
Computer Architecture Letters (CAL), vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 33–36, 2014.
Publisher's VersionAbstractWeb browsing on mobile devices is undoubtedly the future. However, with the increasing complexity of webpages, the mobile device’s computation capability and energy consumption become major pitfalls for a satisfactory user experience. In this paper, we propose a mechanism to effectively leverage processor frequency scaling in order to balance the performance and energy consumption of mobile web browsing. This mechanism explores the performance and energy tradeoff in webpage loading, and schedules webpage loading according to the webpages’ characteristics, using the different frequencies. The proposed solution achieves 20.3% energy saving compared to the performance mode, and improves webpage loading performance by 37.1% compared to the battery saving mode.
Index Terms—Energy, EDP, Cutoff, Performance, Webpages
Paper Presentation (Best of CAL) Y. Zhu and V. J. Reddi, “
WebCore: Architectural Support for Mobile Web Browsing,”
Proceedings of the 41st International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA), vol. 42, no. 3, pp. 541–552, 2014.
Publisher's VersionAbstractThe Web browser is undoubtedly the single most important application in the mobile ecosystem. An average user spends 72 minutes each day using the mobile Web browser. Web browser internal engines (e.g., WebKit) are also growing in importance because they provide a common substrate for developing various mobile Web applications. In a user-driven, interactive, and latency-sensitive environment, the browser’s performance is crucial. However, the battery-constrained nature of mobile devices limits the performance that we can deliver for mobile Web browsing. As traditional general-purpose techniques to improve performance and energy efficiency fall short, we must employ domain-specific knowledge while still maintaining general-purpose flexibility.
In this paper, we first perform design-space exploration to identify appropriate general-purpose architectures that uniquely fit the characteristics of a popular Web browsing engine. Despite our best effort, we discover sources of energy inefficiency in these customized general-purpose architectures. To mitigate these inefficiencies, we propose, synthesize, and evaluate two new domain-specific specializations, called the Style Resolution Unit and the Browser Engine Cache. Our optimizations boost energy efficiency and at the same time improve mobile Web browsing performance. As emerging mobile workloads increasingly rely more on Web browser technologies, the type of optimizations we propose will become important in the future and are likely to have lasting widespread impact.
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