Heterogeneity by the Numbers: A Study of the ODROID XU+E big.LITTLE Platform

The recent availability of modern big.LITTLE ARM chips featuring heterogeneous processor cores has enabled a practical investigation of the heterogeneous chip concept and its implications for performance and energy. The ODROID XU+E platform produced by Hardkernel integrates hardware power monitors for the individual chip clusters, GPU and Memory. In this paper we investigate the detailed energy characteristics of the hardware components and applications to highlight the platform’s potential for energy-aware resource management of the platform. We measure network, storage and CPU energy consumption as well as parallel application performance. We find that the platform offers interesting sweet-spots for fine tuning of resource scheduling, but also poses new challenges, for example for quantifying the cost of switching between clusters.