In the Winter 2008 version of EEMBC Journal, Shay Gal-On, Director of Software Engineering, writes an article on how MultiBench benchmarks reveal multicore’s bottlenecks.

“After nearly two years of discussion, debate, design, development, and testing, our first generation MultiBench™ multicore benchmark software is complete and ready to rip apart any and all symmetrical multicore processors. As a matter of fact, the initial results that we’re seeing in the lab are clearly demonstrating that no matter how ‘beefy’ the multicore processor, there is always some sort of bottleneck. The practical side of this is that the system developer will also likely encounter these bottlenecks.

Putting multiple execution cores into a single processor does not guarantee greater multiples of processing power. However, the right combination of processor and programming techniques can scale well with the number of cores. But the bottom line is…”

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