I just realised after years of learning about how cores work that the big.LITTLE design is actually two CPUs not two sets of cores. With a third X1 core CPU we would then have 3 CPUs in a phone ... wow ...
There are probably tens to perhaps even hundreds of independent processors in a modern phone/computer system design. They're elements of essentially every chip in the device - especially if they provide complex/integrated functionality or communicate digitally with other chips.
Or three cores: http://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack&page=3 (2013, I think). The author only considers one of them "microcontroller-ish", the other two are "quite powerful arm9-like".
So they are essentially a combination of chips rather than a combination of logical units. I always assumed these ‘chips’ are made of logical units like computer cpus 20 years ago with different logical units but that is not true. This is probably why the M1 is better than the microsoft’s ARM implementation because probably Apple is not going the processor route and instead more tightly integrating these logical units reducing latency. This is definitely more work but the it’s probably worth it when you control every bit of the pipeline which is not possible when the pipeline is made of several vendors with their SDKs like on snapdragon based windows laptop.
The Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 has three distinct types of cores.
"Snapdragon 888 ... has three CPU core sizes: a single large ARM X1 core for big single-threaded workloads, three medium Cortex A78 cores for multicore work, and four Cortex A55 cores for background work."
