>> except that it's two Cortex-A7 cores, not one

> you can have 1 - 4 A7s

I stand corrected then. Thanks for the info.

> Using a smaller core to do a specific task is nothing new.

Yes, I know that.

> The most similar idea is Nvidia's but their system doesn't appear to be
> cache coherent so you have to flush the caches when switching between
> cores. The big-little system is cache coherent so is a lot faster and doesn't
> require cache flushes. The switching can also be done at the hypervisor
> level so the OS doesn't even know it's happened.

Yes, ARM Ltd's "big.LITTLE Processing" concept is without doubt the most sophisticated one compared to the concepts currently being implemented by nVidia, TI and Marvell.