Applications on different processing elements have different characteristics such as latency versus bandwidth sensitivity, memory level parallelism, different memory access patterns and the like. Interference between applications due to contention at different sources leads to different effects on performance and is quantified. A method for contention-aware resource provisioning in heterogeneous processors includes receiving stand-alone performance statistics for each processing element for a given application. Multi-core performance slowdown can be computed from the received stand-alone performance statistics. When a request to provision an application on the heterogeneous processors is received, application performance requirements of the application can be determined and a bandwidth for the application can be provisioned based on the application performance requirements and the computed multi-core performance slowdown parameter.