Power and Complexity: Welcome to AMP

Ron Wilson, Altera

Asymmetric multiprocessing (AMP) is on the short list to be the technology acronym of the year for 2016. But what is it, exactly, and why would you want any? More usefully, what are the considerations and challenges in implementing AMP in an embedded system?

Let’s begin with definitions. A symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) system is one in which all the processors are nearly identical below the application level: essentially the same software stacks, instruction sets, memory configurations, and CPU hardware. In most SMP systems, different CPUs will be executing different application threads and generally different CPUs may have different peripheral and interrupt-request connections. But otherwise they are all the same.

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