Cortex-A7 occupies about one quarter or one fifth of the die area and consumes one quarter to one fifth of the power, whereas Cortex-A15, at five times the area and five times the power consumption, you can get two or three times the performance of the Cortex-A7. [1]
So my questions are as follows:
i) But what if both both Cortex A15 and A7 cores are forced to run at the same frequency (using Dynamic Voltage Frequency Scaling - DFVS) for a particular task, will the execution time and power consumption differ in these two processing elements?
ii) If Yes, Why?
iii) What makes these two processing elements operate with different performance and energy consumption?
References
[1] How ARM's Cortex-A7 Beats the A15 : https://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1318968
After having a discussion with Eric Van Hensbergen, a Fellow at ARM, I came to the conclusion that:
If both Cortex A15 and A7 cores are ran at the same frequency using DVFS for a particular task then the Cortex A15 would still end up consuming more energy because of the complexity inside the core. The internal structure of the core does make a lot of intelligent decision making in comparison with Cortex A7 such as branch prediction, etc. and hence end up utilizing a lot of energy to perform such tasks, thus consuming more power.
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