by Kent Fisher, Chief Scientist, Freescale
“Industry consensus on even the most basic definition of what constitutes a multicore processor remains elusive. Participants in the “Trends in Multicore Processor Design and Application Optimization Panel” at the recent Multicore Expo event were barely able to agree on the most basic definition of a multicore processor. After much back-and-forth, the panelists ultimately compromised and agreed that multicore is more than one CPU which can run an operating system and be programmed in ANSI C. So the lack of a common agreement on the definition of a multicore processor might indicate that consensus on a broader multicore taxonomy might be a ways off.”

“For the time being, the current taxonomy used to describe multicore configurations – asymmetric run to completion (AMP), symmetric parallel processing (SMP), functional pipelining, and heterogeneous multicore – together with combinations and derivatives of these, seem sufficient for mapping and discussing multicore architectures and applications until the embedded multicore market matures. In the final analysis, it will be the applications that ultimately drive multicore architectures, and then a taxonomy will naturally follow.”

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