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The approach Qualcomm has taken in their flagship ARM processors is probably correct for laptops as well as phones. There are four low-power single thread core
by dsr_ 5y ago
The approach Qualcomm has taken in their flagship ARM processors is probably correct for laptops as well as phones.
There are four low-power single thread cores. They do grunt work at high efficiency but low capability.
There are three medium-power single thread cores. They suck up more electricity when in use but can get tasks that the user cares about accomplished, and sleep all the time that the phone is not running the UI.
Then there is one high-power single thread core, which is just a turbo-speed variant of the medium cores. That's the one that wakes up for user interaction.
Of course, if you can scale power-consumption and computing together, you would just make an 8-core high-power chip and sleep and throttle on demand -- or, in-between, Apple's M1, which has four low and four high cores.
- schmorptron 5y agoThere are somewhat reliable rumors that intel are doing exactly this big.LITTLE config in the near future. [0] https://wccftech.com/intels-alder-lake-platform-will-introduce-big-and-small-cores-for-x86-desktop-market/ https://wccftech.com/intels-alder-lake-platform-will-introdu...
- nIHOPp6MQw0f5ut 5y agoIt isn't a rumor. Intel announced it at CES. https://www.techradar.com/news/intel-teases-alder-lake-cpus-at-ces-2021-calling-them-a-significant-breakthrough https://www.techradar.com/news/intel-teases-alder-lake-cpus-...
- piyh 5y agoThe reviews on those Intel heterogenous cores were terrible in both battery life and performance. Intel gonna Intel.
- schmorptron 5y agoMaybe they're looking to start on a clean slate with their RISC-V investments then, they're late to the ARM game and will never catch up to apple or probably even qualcomm, their x86 designs are slowly and surely dropping off, and they'd have to make massive strides to change that.