In October 2011, manufacturer ARM announced the construction of the new Big.LITTLE and its Cortex-A7 processor, which was designed to be compatible with the Cortex-A15. Since then, many processors have followed in their footsteps, seeing great results, but what does this jewelry actually contain?
What is a great LITTLE building
great.LITTLE a so-called heterogeneous structures because consisting of two small nuclei also works for cost savings (LITTLE) and others who are very great and have great power but with higher (larger) usage, they are all in the same processor. The idea is to build a basic processor that can better serve the modern needs of a computer and use less energy.
Usually, only one team will work at a time. In other words, when the device is idle or performs light functions, it will be using LITTLE calls while hundreds will be upgraded, but if any high-energy application is working, then the main indicators will be activated, using the existing LITTLE function. For this reason, this kind of applications have a large number of cores, because basically what they have is two processors with the same die.
This way, the device has the expected performance of each type of application being used, but it always tries to reduce usage. For example, when browsing the Internet or using a camera, LITTLE CITs will be used, providing enough performance on it and saving battery power, but when we run the game, the first large package will start working, giving us the best performance despite the high cost.
Why can't we get this build on PC?
Although the purpose of this large-scale design is to save the battery – something that can be used on laptops-, it is also a concept that can be used on PCs, especially now that manufacturers are investing in many efforts to improve performance rather than improve performance. Now why don't we see larger processors.LITTLE on PC?
The answer is simple but complicated at the same time. To start with, logically ARM has a technical patent and can only be done with an ARM processor, which can be excellent for smartphones or low-end devices, but clearly not enough desktop PCs modern. This is undoubtedly the first and most important reason why we don't use it on PC.
The second reason is because the set of instructions used on the PC, is quite different from the one that can be used on smartphones. ARM has its own set of commands, while Intel and AMD use those x86-64 formats. And since PC software is specifically designed for these properties, there will be major ARM compatibility issues.
