Quickly gobbling the power budget
While the SoC multicore processors in popular use today offer a significant MIPS/Wt advantage, in a small footprint such as an AdvancedMC card power consumption cannot be ignored. While the 60 W maximum power for an AdvancedMC card is a significant improvement over the less than 8 W maximum power for PMC cards, a multicore card can quickly reach the 60 W limit and challenge cooling demands.

Many of the multicore processors can take up half the power budget when operating near the high end of its frequency spectrum. Combining the power requirements of the processor with high bandwidth memory interfaces and high speed interconnects such as Serial RapidIO, PCI Express, and Gigabit Ethernet quickly eat into the total power budget.

In these cases the system designer needs to be aware of the end user requirements and likely usage scenarios to determine realistic power budgets. Items that can typically be analyzed to optimize power budgets on an AMC card include I/O such as serial and USB ports, Ethernet, RapidIO, and PCIExpress, RAM size and speed, and CPU operating frequency.

For example, on an AdvancedMC card it is unlikely that all of the front panel I/O will be in use at the same time that the fabric interface and the processor are operating under peak demand, therefore the power requirements for these items can be derated or considered separately.

Additionally, many of the SoC multicore processors are offered in numerous supply voltage and operating frequency configurations which can be used to adjust the total power budget. The increased flexibility of system design offered by the latest multicore processors often means that application demands can be met by the lower power devices.

The power and performance advantages of multicore computing have already substantially revolutionized the desktop computing world and the revolution is rapidly expanding into embedded computing. The SoC multicore processors offer the system designer tremendous computing power and system design flexibility that was previously unavailable.

In power and space confined applications such as AdvancedMCs the increased power and design flexibility requires the system designer to carefully consider the end applications in order to completely realize the performance and flexibility improvements.

Tim Van De Walle is currently the marketing manager at Embedded Planet. He has worked in the embedded industry for more than 10 years. He has held software engineering positions at Motorola and Lockheed Martin. He has an MBA from the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University, an MSE in Electrical Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania, and a BS in Computer Engineering and BA in Philosophy from the University of Notre Dame.