alt Hacker News> Why is it written like that anyway?
Because it's an ARM trademrk, and that's how they want it written:
https://www.arm.com/company/policies/trademarks/arm-trademar...
> (Wikipedia seems to want me to call it "heterogeneous computing", but that doesn't make sense - surely that term should mean running on CPU+GPU at the same time, or multiple different ISAs.)
According to Wikipedia, it means running with different architectures, which doesn't necessarily mean instruction set architectures.
They do actually have different ISAs though. On both Apple Silicon and x86, some vector instructions are only available on the performance cores, so some tasks can only run on the performance cores. The issue is alluded to on Wikipedia:
*> In practice, a big.LITTLE system can be surprisingly inflexible. [...] Another is that the CPUs no longer have equivalent abilities, and matching the right software task to the right CPU becomes more difficult. Most of these problems are being solved by making the electronics and software more flexible.
> They do actually have different ISAs though. On both Apple Silicon and x86, some vector instructions are only available on the performance cores, so some tasks can only run on the performance cores.
No, there's no difference on Apple Silicon. You'll never need to know which kind of core you're running on. (Except of course that some of them are slower.)