by Satish Sathe, AppliedMicro

Today’s SOC (system-on-chip) processors integrate a diversity of cores, accelerators, and other processing elements. These heterogeneous multicore architectures provide increased computational capacity, but the resulting complexity also poses new challenges for embedded-system developers across a variety of applications, including control-plane processors, video servers, wireless base stations, and broadband gateways. Discrete cores each have full access and control of their resources. Such predictable access allows straightforward management and deterministic performance in applications with real-time constraints. In a multicore architecture, however, cores share access to resources, and potential contention complicates many design factors, such as processing latency and deterministically handling interrupts.

To provide deterministic behavior equivalent to that of single-core devices, multicore architectures have begun to implement resource-sharing and management techniques that have been proved in network communications. These architectures use established queue- and traffic-management techniques to efficiently allocate resources among multiple cores, maximize throughput, minimize response latency, and avoid unnecessary congestion.

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