by Faheem Sheikh, Mentor Graphics (published on EETimes)
It’s a common refrain heard among embedded software design teams everywhere, when the team manager declares, “We need better system power management from both the hardware and software, but we also need to optimize the design for increased functionality and performance.”

So, how can a software designer hope to accomplish such a feat when in order to maximize one side of the equation the other side has to be minimized? You just can’t have the best of both worlds.

Interestingly, within embedded multicore system design, unique situations present themselves in which power and performance can complement one another – rather than being in a state of perpetual competition. This article considers one such scenario where a symmetrical multiprocessing (SMP) RTOS, multicore hardware, and power management features combine to facilitate parallel embedded programming.

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