Future Trends on Adaptive Processing Systems

Today ubiquitous computing is steadily growing in daily life, leading to an increasing need of resource awareness especially for devices with limited energy source. The running applications may differ significantly in their requirements and priority and these variations can occur during a single running application as well. Apart from the applications' constraints, there are regularly restrictions regarding the power source, which can vary during runtime. To tackle these issues, the design should focus on systems that can dynamically optimize themselves, according to the current requirements. Adaptive processors offer great advantages, such as the possibility to reconfigure the microarchitecture to specific needs online. Thus, it is possible for the system to be optimized for each stage of the executing applications and the environmental conditions. The design space of adaptive systems is vast if many parameters can be adjusted during runtime. In order to develop and operate these systems, several different approaches must be taken into account. In this work, new design concepts are presented, together with a discussion of future trends in the field of adaptive processing systems.