System challenges and hardware requirements for future consumer devices: From wearable to ChromeBooks and devices in-between

Internet and mobile application have been the driving force for semiconductor innovation in the past 10 years. In this paper, we will focus on the system requirement for today's and tomorrow's consumer gadgets from productivity laptop computers to wearable glasses or watches. We will start with everyone's favorite activity such as taking pictures and sharing with friends, listening to the YouTube music, having a Hangouts video chat, browsing the web for research or monitoring the fitness. We will break these activities into requirements for the software programmers, system architects, technologists and hardware engineers. The well-known memory and energy walls have been limiting the ever increasing compute horsepower and the performance perceived by the user. We will describe areas where hardware and software communities can work together to deliver the ultimate user satisfaction. Finally, a few future research areas in memory architecture, technology and circuit design will be discussed.