by Lawrence Latif, The Inquirer
Intel is interested in following ARM’s “Big Little” design, though operating system support is needed.

As Intel tries to make its way in the smartphone and tablet markets with Medfield and its upcoming Clover Trail processors, the firm is looking at ARM’s Big Little paradigm for its low power processors.

At IDF, Intel CTO Justin Rattner said the firm is interested in putting different cores on a single die.

Rattner, who has overseen Chipzilla’s push into wireless radio and system-on-chip (SoC) design said, “The other kind of heterogeneity we’ve seen on the ARM side is general purpose processors but smaller, slower ones and larger, more powerful ones and moving the workloads around when there is more stuff to do - that’s another area of interest [for Intel]. Obviously operating systems must help there. Most operating systems tend to think all the cores are the same, but [they are] not in that case.”

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