4 ms·

How does big.LITTLE change anything related to your scenario? From my understanding, they’re just high efficiency cores that influence parallelism no differentl

• hakfoo 4y ago
  I think if you say to OS and software vendors "here are a bunch of toy cores, do something useful with them", it finally justifies a nudge towards smarter scheduling. With ordinary SMP, there's little reason not to just assign "first free core". I always envisioned a day where we'd have devote the small cores to "parasitic load" tasks-- your media player, Slack/Discord/etc., and a thousand OS maintenance threads. They might run at 95% load to do not very much, but it's no big deal-- the actual software you cared about now has the big cores to itself, and context switching (along with cache and branch-prediction losses) are reduced. I could even imagine getting to the point where tasks could requisition cores on a "no disruptions until actually yielded by the main process" basis for real-time or maximum performance tasks.
  • hedgehog 4y ago
    In the last few years this is pretty much where we've gotten to. Sometimes I leave Activity Monitor open on my M1 Mac and the four little cores keep the big cores mostly idle until there's a lot of work to do (a build or sigh scrolling a web page).