"Certainly I don't know why ARM would recommend their big.LITTLE architecture (or at least why people would use it) unless it did. " Because they want to compe

"Certainly I don't know why ARM would recommend their big.LITTLE architecture (or at least why people would use it) unless it did. " Because they want to compete with others who keep upping the core numbers. "Furthermore, Amdahl's law means that even in theory it should be advantageous for performance to include a few extra low power cores to boost peak performance (above adding a larger high power core)." Again, in practice, exactly zero of the chips that have done this and been put in phones (nvidia's, etc) have actually saved power by doing so. Or did things get miraculously better when nobody was looking?