Survey on Asymmetric Multicore Processors (e.g. big.LITTLE)

[sparsh]

Modern computing systems have become highly diverse in terms of their workloads, usage pattern, scale and optimization objective. Hence, even a highly-optimized “monolithic core” cannot simultaneously meet such diverse and often conflicting requirements. To address this challenge, asymmetric multicore processors have been proposed which feature cores of different types (e.g. big and LITTLE) in the same processor. Qualcomm Snapdragon 810, Samsung Exynos 5 Octa and Nvidia Tegra X1 are some examples of asymmetric multicores.

My survey, accepted in ACM Computing Surveys 2015, reviews nearly 125 papers on static and re-configurable asymmetric multicore processors.

[Melkhior]