By Christine Van De Graaf
Multicore computing is one of those course-changing technologies - think TV dinners or the phone message machine - proliferating across the range of embedded platforms and permanently changing the face of embedded design.
With new levels of energy-efficient performance enabled by advanced parallel processing and next-generation hafnium-based 45nm technology, many designers are embracing multicore even as they are still learning how to evolve their designs to take full advantage of its benefits.
With the development of multicore, applications using the ETX standard made a seamless jump in performance by shifting from one core to two. The COM Express platform was in fact developed in tandem with the advent of multicore; its primary purpose in embedded design is to provide a means to take advantage of the additional multicore capabilities that there was just not enough pin space for with ETX.
