A NEW DIRECTION FOR COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE RESEARCH

In the past few years, tare important trends have evolved that could c hange the shape of computing: multimedia applications and portable ele ctronics. Together, these trends will lead to a personal mobile-comput ing environment, a small device carried all the time that incorporates the functions of the pager, cellular phone, laptop computer, PDA, dig ital camera, and video game. The microprocessor needed for these devic es is actually a merged general-purpose processor and digital-signal p rocessor, with the power budget of the latter. Yet for almost two deca des, architecture research has focused on desktop or server machines. We are designing processors of the future with a heavy bias toward the past. To design successful processor architectures for the future, we first need to explore future applications and match their requirement s in a scalable, cost-effective way. The authors describe Vector IRAM, an initial approach in this direction, and challenge others in the ve ry successful computer architecture community to investigate architect ures with a heavy bias for the future.