Evaluation of the Intel thread director technology on an Alder Lake processor
Juan Carlos Sáez, Manuel Prieto · 2022
Asymmetric multicore processors (AMPs) combine high-performance big cores with more energy-efficient small cores, all exposing a shared instruction-set architecture but different features, such as clock frequency or microarchitecture. In the last decade, most commercial AMP products have mainly targetted the embedded and mobile domains. Today, major hardware players are releasing new AMP-based products that aim to move beyond the mobile niche, towards the desktop/server segments. The Apple M1 SoC or the recent Intel Alder Lake processor family are clear examples of these new AMP systems. Despite their energy-efficiency benefits, AMPs pose significant challenges to the operating system scheduler.