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EDN Europe's Editor Graham Prophet posts a selection of comments and insights prompted by the many items of industry news and rumour that cross the editorial desk or are gathered on his frequent travels to interviews, press conferences and events around Europe - and further afield - and somehow never find their way to the magazine or the web site, recovering some of the information otherwise lost in the noise level...

Tuesday, March 04, 2008

Whatever happened to….?

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An impression from last week’s Embedded World Show in Nurnberg. Whatever happened to Multicore processing? Let me quickly head you off at the pass if you were about to dash off an email telling me that your company has a range of tools and solutions for implementing numerous different multicore strategies in the embedded space. That is not quite what I had in mind, which is simply this; at Embedded World 2007 you could not walk ten paces down any of the aisles in the show without someone saying, “Can I interest you in my Multicore silicon/board/OS/toolset/development environment?”

I’m not implying that the multicore phenomenon has gone away: far from it. But unless you went looking for it at Embedded World 2008 you would not have identified it as a key, or even a major part, of the products and services on display. Why should the topic have gone from the status of “seriously hot” to – apparently – “just another technology” in such a short time? Was it just a techno-fad?

Of course the answer to that last question is, no. And if you need any proof you have an example in the announcements from Intel, extending its support for the embedded sector with multicore processors in 45-nm technology with 7-year supply commitments, that will let you get dual-, quad-, or octal-cpu configurations within reasonable board and power constraints.

Here’s my guess – so far, unchecked – as to (part of) what might be going on. I suspect that the embedded design community – excepting the fraction that really needs all the processing power it can get its hands on – looked at the hype on multicore, from adding a co-processor or companion core to a design at one end of the spectrum, to full SMP at the other, and took a very cautious approach. Most designers who have tried it – who were not already doing so – have likely opted for the more modest end of the complexity scale, breaking their code into sections explicitly running on one core or another, and passed – for now – on the fancier options. From the vendor side of things, I’d guess that the uptake of the more sophisticated solutions has been a bit on the slow side, hence the reduced emphasis in 2008. Or is that guess completely wrong? Please, do tell me!

Related entries in: Processors/ Software/ Tools |

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