Application developers for software on mobile phones and other embedded devices can achieve acceptable performance levels ten times faster thanks to a breakthrough by European researchers.

Human-readable software code needs to be translated into binary code by a compiler if it is to run on hardware. When hardware is upgraded the software’s compiler usually needs to be tweaked or ‘tuned’ to optimise its performance. If compilers are not optimised for the hardware, doubling the processor size or increasing processor speed can actually result in a loss of software performance, not an improvement. But hardware is changing so quickly compiler developers can’t keep up and compiler optimisation has become a bottleneck in the development process.

Using machine-learning technology, researchers on the Milepost project have developed an automatic way to optimise compilers for re-configurable embedded processors. Whether it is mobile phones, laptop computers or entire systems, the technology automatically learns how to get the best performance from the hardware and the software will run faster and use less energy.

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