The ARM Cortex-A7 processor and big.LITTLE processing announcement are game changers for the "always on' home networking and consumer applications. Developers can now choose the right size processor for the right tasks, making many appliances and devices sometimes up to 70% more energy efficient.At ARM I have been working on the Wireless Infrastructure and Networking market areas for the last couple of years. The energy efficiency value proposition that ARM ALWAYS brings to the table on the consumer side of things is actually relatively new to the traditional networking and wireless infrastructure applications. Power consumption has always been a concern for infrastructure folks, but with the kind of pressure they are under to keep up with exploding mobile internet data rates while keeping the same power footprint it shoots to the top of the list of things that are driving their product decisions. I know that at ARM we certainly think and talk about energy efficiency every day in all our conversations. It was brought home to me even more when my 6 year old daughter was playing "pretend to be mom on a conference call" and kept saying the words "Cortex" and "Energy Efficiency" and then asked me what that meant. I tried to explain it to her in terms, like more time to play Angry Birds without recharging etc. etc... well back to my original point... Energy efficiency conversations at ARM... These conversations are going to enter a new phase where big.LITTLE processing is going to take up big portion of the conversation around energy efficiency. Obviously in some "Big Iron" enterprise applications that are used to having to deal with the power consumption of other architectures that have been more designed for high-end servers, the benefits of our "big" processor the ARM Cortex-A15, alone seems like a huge leap in energy efficiency. In more power sensitive applications like Femto-cells, and Residential gateways, the introduction of our big.LITTLE processing approach is going to be a game changer. Using the "LITTLE" ARM Cortex-A7 for always-on processing and then switching over to the "big" Cortex-A15 when you have a burst of processing requirements brought on by additional IP traffic streams, like your kids watching their favorite episode of "Phineas and Ferb" on Netflix on your iPad or the latest cat antics on YouTube, will provide a significant energy efficiency increase without impacting performance, and over time translate to power consumption savings that will positively impact your electricity bill. I came across some data from the National Resource Defense Council that frankly astounded me. In the US, the set-top-box combinations in a average home consume more power than our refrigerators! While a processor is just a portion of the power consumed in these devices, LITTLE processing can help system designers choose the right sized processor for right task, for example a LITTLE processor for standby mode or even UI and other "always on" tasks, and switch seamlessly to a higher performing processor like the Cortex A-15 when you need the heavy lifting to handle your multiple HD video streams or other functions and compute intensive tasks. I am sure that over the coming months at ARM and with our Partners, the conversations using the term big.LITTLE will be amplified and the next time I catch my daughter playing "mom on a conference call" she will be using "big.LITTLE" in her "mom vocabulary"