Sorting out the confusion about using multicore
In UBM Technology’s most recent Embedded Market Study, about half the developers who participated said they were building embedded designs that incorporate more than one processor, but only 15 percent had committed to the use of multicore architectures. Most of them, about 60 percent, used multiple different processors in a single design, and about 25 percent were using multiple identical, but separate, processors.
If the use of multiple processors in a design is common, why haven’t more embedded developers shifted to designs based on multicore SoC architectures? The responses to Jack Ganssle’s recent column on “Multicore madness” capture the struggles embedded developers are having implementing multicore into their designs.
One of his readers - Kalpak - summarized the reaction to the trend currently toward symmetrical and homogeneous multicore architectures. “Though easier to design and manufacture, symmetric multicore is useless beyond a certain limit for most applications,” Kalpak writes. “What will be more useful is Asym cores; smaller cores each specialized to a specific task.” Whatever the hardware manufacturers do finally standardize on, writes cshore: “it's up to we SW guys to make best use of them.” Somewhat sarcastically, Neznanovic writes: ”I would say replacing a faster clock with multicore is as effective as replacing C with C++ - works well on paper, but not so useful in real life.”
For answers to your questions about multicore, the best place to come is the 2012 ESC Designwest March 26-28 and its Multicore Summit, the venue for the seventh annual Multicore Developer Conference. There will be at least 25 classes on a wide range of topics such as multicore debug and tracing techniques, parallel programming paradigms, applying MCAPI, and creating a compiler infrastructure for heterogeneous multicores,
For additional help, there is Embedded.com’s knowledgebase of several hundred online multicore design articles, white papers, and webinars on designing with multicore architectures.Of those my Editor’s Top Picks this week are:
Manage multiple processes/processors in a deterministic design
Pick the right multicore virtualization use case
Multicore networking in Linux user space with no performance overhead.
Embedded.com Site Editor Bernard Cole is also a partner in TechRite Associates editorial services consultancy. He welcomes your feedback. Call 928-525-9087 or send an email to bccole@acm.org.
This article provided courtesy of Embedded.com and Embedded Systems Design Magazine. Sign up for subscriptions and newsletters. Copyright © 2012 UBM--All rights reserved.
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