A case for bad big.LITTLE switching: how to scale power-performance in SI-HMP

Abstract

Recently, single-ISA heterogemeous multi-core processors (SI-HMP) draw attention, pursuing optimal power-performance scaling. Leveraging differently optimized heterogeneous cores, SI-HMP can dynamically tune performance with minimal additional power consumption, or it can find maximum performance core combination with respect to a given power budget. However, the little-to-big, or big-to-little core switching has hidden costs. To properly scale up/down the power-performance, we should carefully analyze the actual performance gain, considering the multi-core processing model and inter-cluster communication. This paper reveals that there are some good and bad cases for core switching, and presents a possible way to achieve good power-performance scaling through big-little switching.