How Software Utilizes Cores


By Ann Steffora Mutschler When writing software, how does the design engineer determine how much power it will draw on a particular targeted platform? While the question seems straightforward, the answer is not. The industry is just starting to develop the ability to get some data in that space, according to Cary Chin, director of technical marketing for Synopsys’ low-power solutions gr... » 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

A New Reference For Low-Power Processors


By Pallab Chattejee Just how much power can you squeeze out of a processor without destroying performance? Ask IBM. The company introduced a new methodology for power and energy management on its multicore processor chips. The new PowerPC chip, the Power 7, has eight main processor cores each with its own L2 and L3 cache and two central memory controllers. The architecture for the design is... » read more

Hypervisors For Managing Power


By Ed Sperling Hypervisors are headed for a new role inside of multicore chips—managing the various power islands in addition to the cores. A patent application filed by IBM, entitled “Method and system for hypervisor based power management,” shows the company’s intention to use hypervisors for everything from monitoring power consumption rates to scaling power for individual cores.... » read more

Relocating Intelligence


For the past couple of decades, intelligence in a system was largely a function of the logic in a processor. That may change, given some of the disparate discussions now under way across the electronics industry. Putting all the intelligence in one place can make the design process more efficient, but it doesn’t necessarily make the system more efficient, either from a performance or pow... » read more

Multicore Meets Multichannel Memory


Rambus Fellow Craig Hampel talks with System-Level Design about the next bottlenecks in high-performance computing and how to solve them. [youtube vid=jbNg1xdZUoU] » read more

Designing Systems For Power And Throughput


  By Ed Sperling The most energy being consumed inside of processors is no longer for computation. It’s stuff that’s most chip designers think about after the design is completed, such as communication inside and outside the chip, managing those communications and the power levels across the chip. Research from Intel Labs, unveiled at the Intel Developer Forum this week, show that... » read more

End User Report: Things To Do With Multicore


System-Level Design sat down with Lisa Su, senior vice president and general manager of Freescale’s networking and multimedia, to talk about changes in the communications sector and how that’s affecting design. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. By Ed Sperling SLD: Where does multicore fit into the Freescale world? Lisa Su: The difference between us and an AMD and Intel ... » read more

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