Latest Google Chrome’s experiments with ARM LITTLE Cores are designed to improve battery life and performance
Google Chrome is experimenting with the use of LITTLE cores to reduce battery usage. According to code change and flag that we spotted today, Chrome threads will use LITTLE cores on devices with ARM’s big.LITTLE cores.
An explainer regarding the new meta tag states:
“Saving battery or CPU is important for computing devices that are not connected to an electrical source, or to better share common CPU & GPU resources among running processes…Web sites that are known to have high CPU or battery costs may want to request that the UA optimize for CPU or battery, even if the users has not requested it…Most modern OSes also have battery saving features that kick in either when the battery is low or the user wishes to save battery. Ideally web sites should be able to respect these settings. Sites may wish to advice the UA on which strategies work best for the side in these situations.”
The explainer further highlights that the battery savings feature will have the following components:
- A meta tag that allows sites to indicate preferred modes.
- Media queries allowing sites to adjust their style sheets according to battery savings.
- Spec text saying that if the user or OS has gone into a battery savings mode, then the User Agent should apply one or more of the battery savings to the sites.
- Spec text saying that UAs should respect the meta tag on a site unless it conflicts with user or OS settings.
The second feature, which aims to improve Google Chrome’s performance, is restricted to Android devices. The feature has been added to the browser under a new flag called cpu-affinity-restrict-to-little-cores, and its description reads as follows: “Restricts Chrome threads to LITTLE cores on devices with big.LITTLE or similar CPU architectures.”
Now that competition from the Edge browser is heating up, Chrome really needs to become more efficient. Chrome will have to go easy on battery and processor to drop some of the bad press that it has attracted.
What do you think the impact of this change is going to be? Let us know in the comments section.
