Next spring, a smarter paradigm for designing mobile devices will debut at the Association for Computing Machinery’s 17th International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems. There, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT's) Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) will unveil a language that describes a mobile device's functions as sets of rules instead of as instructions. This will allow the functions to be optimally partitioned into hardware and software on an ad hoc basis.
Today, designers of a new mobile device must trust the expertise of engineers in deciding which functions need to be performed in hardware and which in software. In this approach, there are few opportunities to change that partition during the development process even if the prototype shows that too much reliance on software is slowing the device down or too much reliance on hardware is running down the battery. Often any repartitioning has to wait until the next generation device, since changes in prototypes are often too costly and time-consuming to justify.
MIT claims that by switching to its description language, all the functions to be performed by the device can be defined ahead of time, allowing the engineers to experiment with different partitions into hardware and software. This allows them to use analytics to compare performance, energy consumption and cost before deciding on an optimized system to implement as a prototype.
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