Ten Things to Know About big.LITTLE

By _arm - arm Blogs

June 20, 2013

ARM big.LITTLE™ technology is becoming increasingly recognized within the industry as the way forward to meet the demands of higher performance with low power consumption in mobile devices. Since its launch there are now more than twelve ARM partners actively designing with big.LITTLE technology.

As the adoption of big.LITTLE processing spreads there are a number of common questions which have been raised. I’d like to use this blog to answer some of the more common queries:

1. Can you switch on all the cores at once?

2. Is the software similar to existing mechanisms like DVFS and SMP scheduling?

3. Can it run with Android™ today, with no changes to Android?

4. How doesbig.LITTLE enable higher performance?

5. How doesbig.LITTLE enable greater energy savings than just lowering the voltage?

6. Are the power savings available from big.LITTLE significant at the system level?

7. Canbig.LITTLE save power on high performance tasks too?

8. How much user level code needs to be changed to support big.LITTLE?

9. Can there be a different number of big and LITTLE cores?

10. I hear it’s hard to use… how complicated is it?

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