The Yin and Yang of power and performance for asymmetric hardware and managed software

On the hardware side, asymmetric multicore processors present software with the challenge and opportunity of optimizing in two dimensions: performance and power. Asymmetric multicore processors (AMP) combine general-purpose big (fast, high power) cores and small (slow, low power) cores to meet power constraints. Realizing their energy efficiency opportunity requires workloads with differentiated performance and power characteristics.