Designing for Responsiveness with Computational Sprinting

The tight thermal constraints of mobile devices, which limit sustainable performance, and the bursty nature of interactive mobile applications call for a new design focus: enhancing user responsiveness rather than sustained throughput. To that end, this article explores computational sprinting, wherein a mobile device temporarily exceeds sustainable thermal limits to provide a brief, intense burst of computation in response to user input. By enabling tenfold more computation within the timescale of human patience, sprinting has the potential to fundamentally change the user experience that an interactive application can provide.