three categories of core, prime, performance and efficiency cores, with prime cores having higher performance than performance cores; a prime core is known as "big", a performance core is known as "medium", and an efficiency core is known as "small".

A common use of such topology is to provide better power efficiency, especially in mobile SoCs.
* ARM big.LITTLE (succeeded by DynamIQ) is the prototypical case, where faster high-power cores are combined with slower low-power cores.
* Apple