Jeez - how is this supposed to work with OS scheduling? The charm of big.little on arm is that the instruction sets between the big and the little cores are identical. Now the OS has to pin processes based on support for different instructions? What a ridiculous nuisance. Intel really couldn’t discipline themselves just this once and actually implement the same instructions, even if in microcode, for both types of cores?
Are the little cores’ instructions at least a complete subset of the big cores’? Are we going to have some ridiculous situations where the little cores are completely pegged but the OS can’t migrate their processes off to the big core?
Or do kernel programmers need to start chasing Intel and trap/software implement every single future AVX8192AESNISSSE instruction Intel jams into future instruction sets to provide Xeon market differentiation?
Are the little cores’ instructions at least a complete subset of the big cores’? Are we going to have some ridiculous situations where the little cores are completely pegged but the OS can’t migrate their processes off to the big core?
Or do kernel programmers need to start chasing Intel and trap/software implement every single future AVX8192AESNISSSE instruction Intel jams into future instruction sets to provide Xeon market differentiation?