  Mobile systems are embracing heterogeneous architectures by getting more
types of cores and more specialized cores, which allows applications to be
faster and more efficient. We aim at exploiting the hardware heterogeneity from
the browser without requiring any changes to either the OS or the web
applications. Our design, Guadalupe, can use hardware processing units with
different degrees of capability for matched browser services. It starts with a
weak hardware unit, determines if and when a strong unit is needed, and
seamlessly migrates to the strong one when necessary. Guadalupe not only makes
more computing resources available to mobile web browsing but also improves its
energy proportionality. Based on Chrome for Android and TI OMAP4, We provide a
prototype browser implementation for resource loading and rendering. Compared
to Chrome for Android, we show that Guadalupe browser for rendering can
increase other 3D application's frame rate by up to 767% and save 4.7% of the
entire system's energy consumption. More importantly, by using the two cases,
we demonstrate that Guadalupe creates the great opportunity for many browser
services to get better resource utilization and energy proportionality by
exploiting hardware heterogeneity.
