The software performance gain you can expect migrating from single- to multi-core depends on a several factors, not the least of which is the architecture and very nature of the application. A logical starting point would be to scale the single-core performance linearly by the number of cores. But there may be some system overhead that experience shows can consume 10-20% capacity - so a reasonable expectation for many applications is slightly sub-linear, for example 3.2x to 3.8x on a four-core[i]. The really good news is that some embedded applications, such as network packet processing, can actually scale supra-linearly- if the right programming concepts are applied to fully leverage the multi-core platform’s features. Intel has demonstrated this by porting the popular open source Snort network intrusion detection software to a four-core processor, achieving more than 6.2x performance over single-core. This article is a brief summary of that Snort exercise.

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