Intel copying ARM’s big little is just stupid and should not have been done

Re:Intel copying ARM’s big little is just stupid and should ... by h2odragon on Sunday November 14, 2021 @07:20PM (#29222095)

Perhaps little cores on a desktop could be dedicated to realtime / low latency stuff. But the overhead of having them available, even just conceptually, seems high. We've had CPU pinning and NUMA partitioning and shit for a while. They're not widely needed so it not a problem they're hard to use well.

Of course being Intel there's likely to be extra layers of insanity to prevent any interesting potential in the idea from ever being realized meaningfully.

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Re:Intel copying ARM’s big little is just stupid and should ... by silverspoonin on Sunday November 14, 2021 @10:27PM (#29223327)

I'm far from an expert, but to me it seems that a way the little cores can help is by being more efficient (instructions-per-watt). Even in desktop CPUs there are power and thermal limits, and if the littles can take care of lower-priority tasks, the BIG cores can "Turbo Boost" higher and for longer while keeping the whole processor's power and thermal envelopes the same.

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