Big.little test results show promise, ARM reports

11/5/2012 5:15 AM EST

That's different form what observed from Samsung Chromebook and Nexus 10. The Exynos 5 is power hungry.

11/5/2012 10:15 AM EST

The Samsung Exynos 5 uses two A15 cores which are pretty power hungry.

In the A7/A15 big.little approach, the A7 does most of the work and the A15 just powers up a minority of the time to blast through intense jobs. That should cut power by 150% or more, ARM estimates.

Now I wonder, will Intel adopt this concept in mobile?

11/5/2012 11:53 AM EST

Thanks 4 d update Rick, been waiting on some news frm ARM n Samsung 4 a long, long time! big.Little is d future of processors, not jst SOC designs!

11/5/2012 3:15 PM EST

There have been many research projects that have looked at combining Atom and "big cores" e.g. Ivy Bridge and Haswell as well as ARM processors to handle low-level OS functions and some applications while the bigger cores are sleeping. In fact, I think Dell had a laptop that had both "ARM & Intel Inside" to do roughly the same thing.

The A15 is a hot, complex chip that's not particularly performant for the power nor does it yield particularly well. That A7 companion chip and the entire Big.Little concept is a tacit admission of that regrettable reality.

11/10/2012 2:15 PM EST

@ Rick, a Dual core A15 @ 2GHz in our lab is consuming 4W. Mind you, this is just the CPU Cores. When we add the Graphics, Video and IOs, you are looking at around 6-7W. ARM is in big trouble. This big.Little is just a hog-wash. Unless we see this from a 3rd party, I cant believe 50% improvement. ARM CEO can say Power this and power that, but his ARM Cores are getting worse by day.

11/19/2012 11:37 PM EST

I think it's more efficient to improve its power saving mode such as Intel's CPU's C-state.