Good news for high-end mobile device consumers. Computers with processors with ARM big.LITTLE architecture may reduce their cost after the company has decided to take out a single use license mode that is really better for the price. Until now, all the chip manufacturers that have wanted to use this architecture have bought a type of license that allowed them to develop more than one chip model but that was very expensive, now they can buy it to develop only one and thus be able to offer this type chip at a lower price.
We saw this type of chip appear for the first time in the Samsung Galaxy S4 and his chip 5 Exynos Octa. The big.LITTLE concept allows two groups of four cores to be used in the CPU. One of the groups uses low-power, low-performance cores and deals with background or simpler tasks. The other group works when we have more complicated tasks or many at the same time that require more capacity. The eight cores do not work at the same time but having two performance possibilities saves battery.
In the case of the Samsung chip we have a group of cores Cortex-A15 to 1,8 GHz and another of cores Cortex-A7 to 1,2 GHz. The former are really powerful, the latter not so much.
The architecture could also be applied to more powerful 64-bit processors such as the A53 or A57
The licenses given so far are of the old type, expensive, and perhaps that is why only large companies such as Samsung, MediaTek, Renesas, HiSilicon, Marvell or Fujitsu have launched for them. From now on we will be able to see other more modest companies sinking their teeth into it.
What is certain is that at the moment only one mobile device is sold with this type of chip and the easier it is to see them on the street and for a more affordable price, the more access for consumers.
Source: ARM