Stefan Mileschin

Fabless chip maker ARM claims that a test chip using its A15 and A7 cores saved 50 percent on power consumption without sacrificing performance.

According to EETimes the information was released as part of a road map for enabling software for the so-called big.little initiative which pairs a large and small core.

The technology is pretty good and there is talk that even Intel will have to buy it.

Samsung is expected to sample the first big.little SoC before the end of the year, although it is not clear when anyone will see any products coming from it.

Big.little looks at the power drain for mobile workloads. It works on the idea that software can be divided into low performance apps which can be handled on a low power core and a few high performance ones that sometimes need more cores. Big.little automates choosing which job to run on which core to get work done quickly but with less energy.

ARM said that a CPU Migration mode moves jobs between clusters of cores and it has working software available now that will be ready for production before June.

ARM thinks that that A15 probably will deliver about twice the performance of today's A9, and the A7 will about match the A9.

The company's test chip used two A15s and three A7s with a DMC-400 memory controller which uses a 40nm process.

http://news.techeye.net/chips/arm-re...-power-savings