Multicore processors have now become mainstream for both general-purpose and embedded computing. Instead of working on improving the architecture of the next generation multicore, with the DAL project, we deliberately anticipate the next few generations of multicores.While multicores featuring 1000's of cores might become feasible around 2020, there are strong indications that sequential programming style will continue to be dominant. Even future mainstream parallel applications will exhibit large sequential sections. Amdahl's law indicates that high performance on these sequential sections is needed to enable overall high performance on the whole application. On many (most) applications, the effective performance of future computer systems using a 1000-core processor chip will significantly depend on their performance on both sequential code sections and single thread.We envision that, around 2020, the processor chips will feature a few complex cores and many (may be 1000's) simpler, more silicon and power effective cores.In the DAL research project, we will explore the microarchitecture techniques that will be needed to enable high performance on such heterogeneous processor chips. Very high performance will be required on both sequential sections -legacy sequential codes, sequential sections of parallel applications- and critical threads on parallel applications -e.g. the main thread controlling the application. Our research will focus on enhancing single process performance. On the microarchitecture side, we will explore both a radically new approach, the sequential accelerator, and more conventional processor architectures. We will also study how to exploit heterogeneous multicore architectures to enhance sequential thread performance.