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A phone chip mixes fast, power-hungry cores with slow, efficient ones. What is that design called?

Heterogeneous: different kinds of cores on one chip.

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  1. Homogeneous
  2. Superscalar
  3. Heterogeneous ✔

Why: If all cores are copies of each other, the design is homogeneous. Mixing fast and efficient cores is heterogeneous. The phone runs light tasks on the efficient cores to save battery and wakes the fast ones for heavy work.

Huh, didn't know that: Adding GPUs or other accelerators next to the CPU cores is also heterogeneous computing.

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Why did the efficient core get the night shift? It never runs out of energy.
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References

Answer: Heterogeneous. If all cores are copies of each other, the design is homogeneous. Mixing fast and efficient cores is heterogeneous. The phone runs light tasks on the efficient cores to save battery and wakes the fast ones for heavy work.

  1. OpenStax Introduction to Computer Science 5.6: Processor Architectures openstax.org/books/introduction-computer-science/pages/5-6-processor-architectures
    some are fast but power hungry while others are slow but power efficient, the design is called heterogeneous
    Checked 2026-10-10.

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