ARM seems to be quite serious when it comes to big.LITTLE chips and it is now getting more companies on board. The idea behind big.LITTLE is to combine low-power and high performance cores on a single die, allowing for more power efficiency in ARM SoCs.

On Wednesday ARM said that seventeen companies have already licensed big.LITTLE and the company is expanding its licensing program to get even more on board. ARM did not release the names of big.LITTLE licensees, but its own website lists Samsung, Fujitsu Semiconductor, MediaTek, Renesas Mobile, CSR, LSI has HiSilicon and Marvell.

Qualcomm, Nvidia and Apple are conspicuously absent from the list.

Seven companies are slated to release big.LITTLE SoCs later this year, but little is known about the actual chips. Samsung was the first outfit to publically announce a consumer oriented big.LITTLE chip, the Exynos 5 Octa.

Meanwhile Nvidia is still pushing its 4+1 core approach, which was used on the Tegra 3 and has now been revamped for Tegra 4 and Tegra 4i chips. Qualcomm feels it can keep power consumption down by designing custom cores, and so does Apple.

More here.