Guadalupe: a browser design for heterogeneous hardware

Abstract: Mobile systems are embracing heterogeneous architectures by getting more types of cores and more specialized cores, which allows applications to be faster and more efficient. We aim at exploiting the hardware heterogeneity from the browser without requiring any changes to either the OS or the web applications. Our design, Guadalupe, can use hardware processing units with different degrees of capability for matched browser services. It starts with a weak hardware unit, determines if and when a strong unit is needed, and seamlessly migrates to the strong one when necessary. Guadalupe not only makes more computing resources available to mobile web browsing but also improves its energy proportionality. Based on Chrome for Android and TI OMAP4, We provide a prototype browser implementation for resource loading and rendering. Compared to Chrome for Android, we show that Guadalupe browser for rendering can increase other 3D application's frame rate by up to 767% and save 4.7% of the entire system's energy consumption. More importantly, by using the two cases, we demonstrate that Guadalupe creates the great opportunity for many browser services to get better resource utilization and energy proportionality by exploiting hardware heterogeneity.