AMD patents task transition technology for big.LITTLE CPUs

VideoCardz writes an AMD patent that describes a method to perform task transition between heterogeneous processors has been made public. The patent, which got filed in December 2019, basically provides further evidence that AMD is also working on processors that feature a combination of high-performance cores and energy-efficient cores.

Intel will bring this concept to the x86 world later this year, with the introduction of the Alder Lake architecture. It's rumored AMD's first "big.LITTLE" product will be "Strix Point", a laptop processor that will reportedly use 3nm Zen 5-based high-performance cores in combination with smaller cores codenamed Zen4D. This is believed to be the Ryzen 8000 series generation.

In short, AMD describes that the CPU will relocate tasks between the cores based on one or multiple metrics. These include execution time of the task, a requirement of using memory at maximal performance state, direct access to memory, or a metric of average idle state threshold. If any of such (and others listed in the patent) metrics meet the criteria, the task is then relocated from the first processor core to the second core. Clearly, this is not a very detailed description, but it should provide a brief idea of what is being discussed in the patent.