AMD has obtained a patent for heterogeneous microprocessors with two types of general purpose cores. The technology resembles Arm's famous Big.Little architecture and could be used for processors for low-power and mobile devices. The patent describes a microprocessor having two types of general purpose cores that execute two different subsets of the same instruction set architecture (ISA). The first type of kernels are configured to support a larger subset of ISA and exhibit high performance, while the second type of simplified kernels are configured to consume less power. Different types of kernels can share memory and cache locations. This technology allows AMD to build power-efficient processors based on x86, Arm, and other architectures (but not all at the same time) with two classes of general-purpose cores.
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(Image credit: AMD) An important capability described by AMD in its patents is the dynamic passing of a thread from one core to another (assuming all features are supported) if a high-performance core is underutilized or a low-performance core . consumption is overused. The method could give the processor more freedom to load balance its cores with little or no intervention from an operating system, although it remains to be seen how this will work as load balancing of Even homogeneous multicore processors on the operating system side have been a determining factor in performance in recent years. Patent number 10698472 was filed on October 27, 2017, after AMD began manufacturing and selling microprocessors running on the Zen microarchitecture and years after abandoning development of its low-power ``Cats'' cores based on in Jaguar and Puma Microarchitectures. Therefore, it is likely that AMD will consider introducing Zen derivatives or a completely new microarchitecture for low-power and low-cost applications. Patent research is not really a rewarding business as companies spend billions of dollars in research and development for hundreds of patents every year and far from all patents are not implemented in actual products. General purpose microprocessors with different cores have become ubiquitous in smartphones and are likely to become ubiquitous in mobile PCs as well. Meanwhile, there's no guarantee that we'll see hybrid processors like AMD's Intel Lakefield in the foreseeable future. The patent abstract reads as follows: "A heterogeneous processor system includes a first processor that implements an instruction set architecture (ISA) that comprises an ISA feature set and is configured to support a first subset of the ISA feature set. ". The heterogeneous processor system also includes a second processor implementing the ISA comprising the ISA feature set and configured to support a second subset of the ISA feature set, wherein the first subset and the second subset of the ISA feature set ISA are different from each other. other. When the first subset includes the entire ISA function set, the second lower-end processor is configured to execute an instruction thread using less power and with lower throughput than the first processor. " Sources: Justia, USPTO, FPO (via Tom's Hardware)