How Flexible is Your Computing System

Abstract: In literature computer architectures are frequently claimed to be highly flexible, typically implying there exist trade-offs between flexibility and performance or energy efficiency. Processor flexibility, however, is not very sharply defined, and as such these claims can not be validated, nor can such hypothetical relations be fully understood and exploited in the design of computing systems. This paper is an attempt to introduce scientific rigour to the notion of flexibility in computing systems.