Exploring Extended Reality with ILLIXR: A New Playground for Architecture Research

As the need for specialization increases and architectures become increasingly domain-specific, it is important for architects to understand the requirements of emerging application domains. Augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) or extended reality (XR) is one such important domain. This paper presents a generic XR workflow and the first benchmark suite, ILLIXR (Illinois Extended Reality Benchmark Suite), that represents key computations from this workflow. Our analysis shows a large number of interesting implications for architects, including demanding performance, thermal, and energy requirements and a large diversity of critical tasks such that an accelerator per task is likely to overshoot area constraints. ILLIXR and our analysis have the potential to propel new directions in architecture research in general, and impact XR in particular. ILLIXR is open-source and available at https://illixr.github.io