Earlier quoted context omitted.
"The A53 cores will likely carry the vast majority of every day use, and redouble the battery savings." non-ARM-manufacturer citation needed :). My experience as a compiler guy (that makes the toolchains for these kinds of phones) has been that big little brings improvements to what these guys can shove on a chip and advertise, but so far not real improvements to battery life or real numbers. There reason why is pret…
You don't want A53's "handling the majority of the workload". Yes. You do. If I'm casually browsing non-intensive web pages, e-reading, or watching a Netflix movie, or even encoding a video, the background is doing IO rate limited system updates and basic data logging, etc, the vast majority of the time the CPU demands are very low, but frequent enough that putting a CPU to sleep is completely out of the question. An…
Encoding a video should not be CPU, so let's get that out of there. Most of the rest is more GPU dependent than CPU dependent. The amount of CPU time you should be spending on these tasks is really low.
For example, web browsing and reading, the CPU should be asleep most of the time.
Now, don't get me wrong, there are plenty of very silly little tasks for A53's to do, but what you listed are not those tasks.
It's more things like "syncing" or something that is a poll loop and event bound, not something that is in any way CPU bound. Period. CPU bound stuff is not something for the A53's in this to tackle. It makes battery life worse. That is what the actual, in-the-field data says.
" a much better middle tier power usage level, than the A57"
Truthfully, for most A53 cores, this is true only in the dreams of the chip designers.
"but it is a very good bet for most real world usage."
Then what, pray tell, do you expect the A57's to be doing in this world?
And why, in practice, has big.little and other things not shown any better battery life at all if it's really a better way of doing things.
I have no doubt it may be a better way of doing things in the future, but it ain't right now ;)