HETEROGENEOUS THREAD SCHEDULING

Heterogeneous thread scheduling techniques are described in which a processing workload is distributed to heterogeneous processing cores of a processing system. The heterogeneous thread scheduling may be implemented based upon a combination of periodic assessments of system-wide power management considerations used to control states of the processing cores and higher frequency thread-by-thread placement decisions that are made in accordance with thread specific policies. In one or more implementations, a system workload context is periodically analyzed for a processing system having heterogeneous cores including power efficient cores and performance oriented cores. Based on the periodic analysis, cores states are set for some of the heterogeneous cores to control activation of the power efficient cores and performance oriented cores for thread scheduling. Then, individual threads are scheduled in dependence upon the core states to allocate the individual threads between active cores of the heterogeneous cores on a per-thread basis.