multicore

The single core processor is reaching its performance ceiling, due to energy, thermal and power concerns. To address these issues that cause design difficulties, many embedded designers are migrating embedded applications from single core to multicore. This article provides an outline for a software strategy to progress from one core to two and beyond using [...]

Glenn Perry, general manager of Mentor Graphics Embedded Software Division, discusses embedded development trends.

The use of multicore processors is on the rise to meet inexorable demand for increasingly sophisticated functionality in embedded systems. Hardware virtualization technology provides a complementary and game-changing approach to maximizing the utility of that extra silicon horsepower. The Power Architecture has included hardware virtualization support since 2001 in its server-based instruction set architecture (ISA). [...]

System Modeling Language (SysML) is a Unified Modeling Language (UML) profile that allows the creation of standard descriptions of a system. However, this profile is too generic to address embedded and real-time system design. The Modeling and Analysis for Real-Time and Embedded Systems (MARTE) UML profile attempts to fill this gap by providing elements from [...]

Major players in embedded development tools debate some of the key issues facing themselves and their customers.

Until recently, operating system (OS) specification for embedded systems has been seen largely as an ‘either/or’ exercise. Similarly, OSs that have their foundations in the embedded market and those that have grown out of desktop computers have been seen as competing rather than complementary technologies. Cost and performance criteria within specifications will often lead to […]

Sharing industry-driven best practices in parallel programming is the only way to unlock the benefits of efficient use of multicore silicon platforms and dramatically increase their rate of adoption. It is now widely agreed that the largest single brake on the adoption rate for multicore platforms is the ability of software developers to program them. […]

For the sake of clarity and sanity, let me first point out that you are reading an article written in the fall of 2008. The importance of this will become obvious when I reveal my topic: parallel programming for the multicore age. You thought I was about to claim first-past-the-post on a new technological challenge […]

The Open Virtual Platforms (OVP) initiative aims to help resolve the difficulties that arise today when modeling multicore systems-on-chip (SoC) so that designers can perform early and timely test of the embedded software that will run on the end devices. As architects continue to add more cores to meet hardware design goals, the complexity of […]