Workload Characterization of Commercial Mobile Benchmark Suites

Mobile devices are essential in our daily lives. The hardware and software of these devices differs from their desktop and server counterparts. Evaluating these devices fairly and accurately requires special benchmarks. However, the computer architecture community lacks studies analyzing the performance characteristics of mobile benchmarks. This paper presents an extensive workload characterization of commercial mobile bench-mark suites using several hardware performance counters. We analyze the temporal behaviours of benchmarks. Our findings show the diverse load patterns across CPU core clusters. Our clustering analysis reveals a benchmark subset that reduces evaluation time by close to 75%, while preserving the richness of benchmark coverage. This work contributes insights for refining mobile benchmarking methodologies, providing a valuable compass for researchers navigating the landscape of mobile system architecture assessments.

I. Introduction

Mobile devices, ranging from smartphones and tablets to smartwatches, are projected to exceed 18 billion units by 2025 [1]. In comparison, the total number of desktop, laptop and server computers worldwide is estimated at over 2 bil-lion [2]. Despite this, a mere 1 % of top computer architecture conference papers in 2018 delved into mobile computing, highlighting a research gap [3].