AMD CPU engineers say they have "spent a lot of time talking" about a hybrid architecture reminiscent of Arm's big.LITTLE design, but until they see noticeable improvements in doing so, AMD's chips will appear with such an architecture He said that we should not expect to see such a chip from AMD until we see significant improvements. And that is certainly a shot in the arm for Intel.

"We've been studying big.LITTLE," CVP and Product CTO Joe Macri said at the engineering roundtable. We continue to study it and look at it. We're not going to talk about whether or not we're going to do it, but we're going to talk about some of the challenges associated with it and what we really want to do with it. Is the goal power efficiency? Is the goal just marketing, 'We want to increase the number of cores,' regardless of what the other two variables are going to be?

"At AMD, we're going to throw the marketing out the window," Makris explained. 'We're not going to do it just to make the numbers bigger.'

The challenge facing AMD and other companies jumping into hybrid chip design, Macri explains, is to make sure that the system recognizes and makes good use of mixed cores. Solving this problem requires software expertise and OS legwork.

"When you look at the scheduler," Macri continues, "this is the same for any schedule, whether it is scheduling planes, trains, or computers, the most important attribute the scheduler wants to see is symmetry. [That's] why airlines choose the 737 and only use it. Southwest is the biggest example of that. They can apply that plane anywhere in the system, whenever they want, and know exactly what will happen. That's what the OS likes; it loves a symmetrical core and never gets the answer wrong. When you start making a system asymmetric, the OS has to get smarter. And the OS is getting smarter and starting to deal with it." [The general concept of hybrid chip architecture, similar to Arm's big.LITTLE, was to improve performance while minimizing power consumption, an important metric for mobile and battery-critical devices such as cell phones and tablets.

However, Intel is now looking to introduce a hybrid architecture, Intel Alder Lake, in desktop PCs by 2021. While minimizing power consumption will certainly enable designs with better performance per watt, so far this has not been put to practical use by any of the major x86 chipmakers.

Intel Alder Lake will feature eight Golden Cove cores and eight Gracemont Atom cores, effectively giving Intel one chip, albeit only if half of them are considered suitable for a gaming PC CPU. will have 16 cores to play with.

"Until the software comes along, it won't help much to have almost no increase in core count," Macri says. [15] "It's not a simple problem, and I think at least one company is getting it right. But I'm not saying that all companies are right; what we're really fighting with AMD on big.LITTLE is that Mike's team is doing a great job on big.LITTLE, which makes it harder to win on LITTLE. LITTLE [is] when the OS has the right attributes, has the right features in the scheduler and memory allocator, and has the right memory subsystem. And when the OS has the right attributes, the scheduler and memory allocator have the right capabilities, and the memory subsystem has the right memory subsystem. If you can't make a noticeable difference in the experience, why do it? 0]

While it is true that some shade has been thrown at Intel by AMD, at least at this early stage with nothing to prove otherwise, it certainly highlights potential concerns about the real-world applications of hybrid designs on the desktop. However, I will say this. If any company has the software engineers and expertise to deliver a practical x86 hybrid design, it would be Intel. And from what I hear, the work Intel is doing now may help pave the way for AMD to develop hybrid chips in the future.

But probably not right away. [Regardless of the silicon, the biggest gains in PC performance come at a time when the competition is at its most intense, a time of light and darkness for the company. Right now, the Ryzen 5000 is heating up the gaming performance battle, and Intel is coming back next year (starting with Intel Rocket Lake) with a new and interesting design that is different from anything that has come before.