How designers can survive the embedded multiprocessor revolution

By Simon Davidmann, Imperas
(11/04/07, 09:35:00 PM EST) -- Embedded.com

As Microsoft's Herb Sutter has stated at various occasions - the free lunch is over. On paper the hardware performance improvements continue as normal. To do this, hardware designers, who ran into energy consumption issues a while back, came up with a simple solution and successfully implemented it: instead of increasing clock speed they increased the number of processors.

As a result hardware design can now deliver increased performance based on original roadmap, on first sight satisfying the ever increasing appetite of consumers for more features, more performance at lower cost and lower power consumption.

However, when trying to program these devices, things don't quite add up. Existing, sequential software is unable to unleash the increased performance that the hardware devices offer. Placing software development at a crossroads.

If hardware designers are not able to provide appropriate software development environments that support their devices, the future looks grim. They won't sell any! Without appropriate multiprocessor software development environments programmers will be left out in the cold and will not be able to leverage additional performance offered by Multiprocessor System-on Chips (MPSoCs)

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