This paper we suggest a different computing environment as a worthy new direction for computer architecture research: personal mobile computing, where portable devices are used for visual computing and personal communications tasks. Such a device supports in an integrated fashion all the functions provided to-day by a portable computer, a cellular phone, a digital camera and a video game. The requirements placed on the processor in this environment are energy efficiency, high performance for multimedia and DSP functions, and area efficient, scalable designs. We examine the architectures that were recently pro-posed for billion transistor microprocessors. While they are very promising for the stationary desktop and server workloads, we discover that most of them are un-able to meet the challenges of the new environment and provide the necessary enhancements for multimedia applications running on portable devices.