Heterogeneous Multi-core systems have cores which are not identical in terms of micro-architecture, clock frequency, cache size, etc, whereas homogeneous multi-core systems include only identical cores.

Current operating systems are not designed to handle heterogeneous multi-core processor. Especially, it is difficult to exploit the heterogeneity/affinity of resources and tasks. To fully exploit heterogeneous multi-core systems, intelligent scheduling of tasks becomes one of the critical issues.