LinuxCon + CloudOpen + ELC-E Europe 2014

Multicore silicon architectures are everywhere. Until recently, these architectures where homogeneous. Recent big.LITTLE silicon aims to trade-off power consumption against computational throughput.
Typically, the big cores are used for high performance tasks like web browsing, games and image processing. Unfortunately, the usage of big cores comes with high power consumption levels - resulting in a disappointing battery life.
The little cores have a much lower power consumption level, but typically used in ‘idle mode’.

In this presentation we show how we reworked Chromium to use all available ‘little’ CPUs in a parallel fashion to achieve a highly responsive browser without incurring the power penalty of using the big cores. Experiments with real websites show that this results in a 5x power consumption reduction - at the same performance.