ARM compares this new DynamIQ technology to the revolutionary big.LITTLE technology it introduced back in 2011.

For those who came in late, ARM’s big.LITTLE enabled a processor to have two different sets of cores, one high power and one energy efficient, and which works depending on the task required to save power.

DynamIQ takes this big.LITTLE technology to the next level, improving the heterogeneous processing capabilities of ARM processors. Only the cores that are really needed will be activated, no matter the combination, be those be one, three, four, or seven.

Currently processor configurations would have a more or less even number of cores, but ARM DynamIQ will pave the way for different combinations.

It is unlikely that ARM DynamIQ processors will pop up in smartphones for a while. ARM wants it for workstations and servers dedicated to artificial intelligence and machine learning. This is bad news for Intel because it is mostly its home turf and is now getting increasingly squeezed.