| 摘要 |
<p>A data processing apparatus and method are provided for switching performance of a workload between two processing circuits. The data processing apparatus has first processing circuitry which is architecturally compatible with second processing circuitry, but with the first processing circuitry being micro-architecturally different from the second processing circuitry. At any point in time, a workload consisting of at least one application and at least one operating system for running that application is performed by one of the first processing circuitry and the second processing circuitry. A switch controller is responsive to a transfer stimulus to perform a handover operation to transfer performance of the workload from source processing circuitry to destination processing circuitry, with the source processing circuitry being one of the first and second processing circuitry and the destination processing circuitry being the other of the first and second processing circuitry. The switch controller is arranged, during the handover operation, to cause the source processing circuitry to make its current architectural state available to the destination processing circuitry, the current architectural state being that state not available from shared memory shared between the first and second processing circuitry at a time the handover operation is initiated, and that is necessary for the destination processing circuitry to successfully take over performance of the workload from the source processing circuitry. Further, the source processing circuitry and second processing circuitry implement an accelerated mechanism to make the current architectural state available to the destination processing circuitry without routing of the current architectural state via the shared memory. Since the accelerated mechanism is quick and energy efficient, it increases the number of situations it which it is energy efficient to make the switch from one processing circuitry to the other.</p> |
