Most applications will have parts that are either strictly sequential or difficult or inefficient to parallelize, and also parts that greatly benefit from parallelization. The logical way to handle this is to have different hardware to handle both cases. We can utilize one powerful piece of hardware that can do things sequentially for the sequential part, and many less powerful pieces of hardware to parallelize the parallelizable components. For the same expense (as in, cost of the chip), we could get a few powerful cores, but this would make the parallel portion of our application slower. We could get many, many less powerful cores, but this would make the sequential portion of our application slower. Thus heterogeneous hardware is the better solution. The catch is that each application will have an "optimum hardware," and this will be different for every application. So, you need to find something that will work well for most applications you will be using, which can be difficult.
Most applications will have parts that are either strictly sequential or difficult or inefficient to parallelize, and also parts that greatly benefit from parallelization. The logical way to handle this is to have different hardware to handle both cases. We can utilize one powerful piece of hardware that can do things sequentially for the sequential part, and many less powerful pieces of hardware to parallelize the parallelizable components. For the same expense (as in, cost of the chip), we could get a few powerful cores, but this would make the parallel portion of our application slower. We could get many, many less powerful cores, but this would make the sequential portion of our application slower. Thus heterogeneous hardware is the better solution. The catch is that each application will have an "optimum hardware," and this will be different for every application. So, you need to find something that will work well for most applications you will be using, which can be difficult.
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