On Wednesday, ARM formally unveiled its next-generation smartphone processor, the Cortex A7, codenamed “Kingfisher.” But there was much more to the A7?s launch than just the unveiling of a new processor architecture for smartphones. The chip company also announced plans to pair the A7 with the much larger and more powerful Cortex A15 in phones and tablets, using a technique called heterogeneous multiprocessing (or “big.LITTLE”, as ARM prefers to call it) to dynamically move lighter workloads from the larger, more power-hungry A15 to the leaner A7 in order to extend mobile battery life.

When...