The New Multicore Approach


It’s probably too harsh to say that multicore has been a failure, but it’s flat-out wrong to say it has been successful. Multicore was an inevitable outgrowth of Moore’s Law. You simply can’t keep turning up the frequency for processors at advanced nodes without cooking the chip into oblivion. In theory, four cores running at a much cooler 1GHz should be better than one core running... » read more

Performance Plus Lower Power


By Pallab Chatterjee Power and performance often have been seen as something of a tradeoff. Chipmakers focus on one or the other, or they extract a little improvement in both at each new process node. That way of thinking is changing, though. At the recent Linley processor conference, the central theme for both standalone and embedded processors was that architectures have to optimized for ... » read more

From Multicore To Many-Core


By Ed Sperling Future SoCs will move from multiple cores—typically two to four in a high-power processor—to dozens of cores. But answers are only beginning to emerge as to where and how those cores will be deployed and how they will be accessed. Just as Moore’s Law forced a move to multicore architectures inside a single processor because of leakage at higher frequencies, it will begi... » read more

Where’s The Multicore Software?


By David Lammers Multicore processors are being readied for embedded applications but software developers will need to get prepared if they expect to wring the maximum benefits from them. Rob Oshana, director of software R&D at Freescale Semiconductor’s networking and multimedia group, said software developers increasingly are asking if their code will easily port to multicore CPUs. �... » read more

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