How does the Windows 11 scheduler work with Big.Little CPUs?

At the beginning of this year, Big.Little was still a smartphone thing, in most tablets. Intel brought this principle to desktops and laptops with Alder Lake, while AMD is working on a more compact and more power-efficient version of its Zen 4 cores. Processors with different types of cores suddenly seem to be the future of the x86 world. The Windows 11 scheduler is optimized to work with these hybrid processors. What is the theory behind it and, more importantly, how does this combination of different types of cores work in practice?

Although “Big.Little” is the term by which the principle of a processor with different types of cores is known and is also the term we choose in this article, Arm has now officially renamed its proprietary technology to “DynamIQ”. On paper, Intel’s hybrid performance architecture is very similar to the Arm concept. Thus the objectives with which they are developed are identical; Maximum energy efficiency and performance within the limits of heat production and energy consumption. In practice, with Arm chips the focus is more on economy and with x86 processors more on maximizing the use of available power and heat space, but this is more due to the type of hardware in which both types of CPUs are primarily used. For a difference in technical approach.