If you’ve been following Linaro work, you may have read they develop big.LITTLE processing on TC2, a Test Chip based on 2 Cortex A15 cores and 3 Cortex A7 cores. Charbax is at ARM Techcon 2012 and he shot an interesting video showing 2 Versatile Express development boards based on TC2 demonstrate different big.LITTLE processing schedule strategies:
- The first scheduling strategy switches between Cortex A15 and Cortex A7 depending on the load required.
- The second scheduling strategy makes use of 5 cores at the same time and runs high load tasks on the Cortex A15 cores whereas simpler tasks are run on Cortex A7 core. This is only available on Android and Linux and the moment.
TC2 is an actual silicon (not FPGA), and as they opened the casing of the development kit (Around 5:00 in the video), you’ll see a fan to cool down the SoC as it is one of the first versions and may not be fully optimized for power consumption yet.
If you want to find out more, check out ARM Versatile Express page. The model used in the video seems to be a combination of Motherboard Express with CoreTile Express for Cortex-A15, Cortex-A7.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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ARM has just written a blog post giving more details about the big.LITTLE hardware platform shown above:
http://blogs.arm.com/software-enablement/843-cortex-a15-and-cortex-a7-biglittle-hardware-from-arm