Researchers at The University of Michigan, Arizona State University, and Princeton University will, during the next four years, explore core technologies for the next generation of computer systems, suitable for untethered pervasive computing. The requirements of the computing sub-strate in such devices is mind boggling, and so we have collected our research under the title of Mobile Supercomputing. We believe this phrase captures the need for the order-of-magnitude increase in performance need by such systems, while maintaining the minimal power budget that is essential for mobile computing systems. The core technologies are a synergistic combination of novel co-design and circuit techniques that integrate into a generic platform architecture for mobile supercomputing.
The significance of this work for the user of tomorrows pervasive mobile computers will be that that they will provide a highly versatile light-weight computing and communication device with hands-free user interfaces such as speech recognition, gesture recognition, facial expression, and streaming voice/video. This will allow the user to perform stand alone computing, communicate with others in a number of ways, and provide a sophisticated portal to the internet and other remote computing resources.
