Energy-Aware Mobile Application Development by Optimizing GCC for the ARM Architecture

Nowadays, mobile domain is growing much faster than the desktop domain. This is since people are obsessed with the concept of “portable devices”, which is catered to by handheld devices. Even if small in size, portable devices are responsible for a considerable share of power consumption, primarily due to their abundance. So, ample attention has to be provided in optimizing the applications in this field also. Some of the power consumption is reduced by the ARM core, which is well-known for its power-efficient working. If the applications running on the mobile can also be optimized, the end result will be a considerably efficient and low-power mobile device. We tweak the existing optimizations in such a way that they provide the best possible performance. To increase the level of optimization, we perform optimization reordering, instruction selection, and so on. The end result is projected to give around 32% improvement, which translates to a considerable change in power consumption (up to 35,000 MW per year), and ultimately forms a big step forward in green computing. We take the instance of GCC, which is one of the major contributors to application development.