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Analyzing applications, ARM has concluded that widespread use of powerful computing cores are often unprofitable. Receiving messages, for example, or audio output work successfully on small cores previous generations, while consuming significantly less power. Thus was born the concept of big.little, which means work together as part of a SoC-assembly of cores from different generations. It seems that the first practical implementation was in the processor NVIDIA Tegra 3, which is based on four productive core Cortex-A9 and single core A5. NVIDIA calls the technology architecture Variable Symmetric Multiprocessing (vSMP, alternating symmetrical multiprocessing).
ARM company has released a test chip, which combines two core Cortex-A15 and three core Cortex-A7. According to the developer, core Cortex-A15 cores is twice as productive as Cortex-A9, whereas the performance of the updated core Cortex-A7 is approximately equal to the performance of Cortex-A9. In the practical test hybrid was able to prove that the power consumption can be reduced on average by 50% without sacrificing performance. In some cases, reduction of consumption reaches 150%.
It is expected that before the end of the year, Samsung will create its own version of SoC, the concept of using big.little. Such approach is likely to continue to operate in Tegra 4 from NVIDIA company. Many people would be interested to see Intel processors , combining Atom core and Ivy Bridge. From our point of view, this would make sense in the case of processors for tablets and ultrabooks. This would reduce the cost of systems based on processors with ultra low power, because there is enough rigorous selection on the parameters. Combined processors may be easier to produce and therefore less expensive.
More progressive mode - big.little MP, when all cores are working at the same time, and the load looking for optimal (core) for their work - is still in the early stages of development. But over the next year we can talk about the practical implementation of the regime big.little MP. Related Products :
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