Full-System Simulation of big.LITTLE Multicore Architecture for Performance and Energy Exploration

Single-ISA heterogeneous multicore processors have gained increasing popularity with the introduction of recent technologies such as ARM big.LITTLE. These processors offer increased energy efficiency through combining low power in-order cores with high performance out-of-order cores. Efficiently exploiting this attractive feature requires careful management so as to meet the demands of targeted applications. In this paper, we explore the design of those architectures based on the ARM big.LITTLE technology by modeling performance and power in gem5 and McPAT frameworks. Our models are validated w.r.t. the Samsung Exynos 5 Octa (5422) chip. We show average errors of 20% in execution time, 13% for power consumption and 24% for energy-to-solution.