AMD Heterogeneous CPU Design Topology Patches Coming For Linux 6.13

[unwind-protect]

I dunno.

I was very happy to find a CPU full of mostly even cores when running on AMD.

Guess that party is over soon.

[Mitch]

I'm very happy to see continued focus and progress in this area. I think one of the hangups with mobile devices is how poorly they handle near-idle and low utilization scenarios in terms of efficiency. You might get 16 hours when running something very simple like watching a video that's hardware accelerated, but then you get 6 to 10 hours when you have some kind of background stuff going on, like keep-alive tasks, checking e-mail, syncing, downloading files, etc.

Heterogeneous architecture can potentially enable these tasks to run cool and quiet. If HW vendors can get these totally sorted for efficiency, perhaps they can design even more efficient cores that are designed to do all the background work super efficiently and allow the majority of the HW to stay asleep 99% of the time, until a real workload comes in.

IIRC, the CPUs in smart watches often have architectures like this since they're supposed to be extremely efficient while they're also constantly processing data and need to be ready for notifications. I think they call this special hardware 'always-on processors' and 'co-processors'.

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMD Heterogeneous CPU Design Topology Patches Coming For Linux 6.13

The latest patches from AMD Linux engineers for working on x86 heterogeneous design identification were queued last week for introduction in the Linux 6.13 kernel...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Hetero-Topo-Linux-6.13