by Robert S. Grimes
Modern field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are great for a wide range of high-speed, complex signal processing but can be difficult to interface to external systems. Microprocessors are great for interfacing to other systems, especially when equipped with Ethernet for communications, but don’t offer the same levels of performance.
Until recently, [...]

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by Paul Stravers, Vector Fabrics
In this product how-to article, Vector Fabrics’ Paul Stavers describes a more efficient way to parallelize code for embedded multicore designs illustrating the process using the company’s online tool to parallelize Google’s VP8 video decoder.
Many silicon vendors rely on multicore architectures to improve performance. However, some engineers might say that [...]

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by Paul Stravers, Vector Fabrics
In this product how-to article, Vector Fabrics’ Paul Stavers describes a more efficient way to parallelize code for embedded multicore designs illustrating the process using the company’s online tool to parallelize Google’s VP8 video decoder.

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by Wayne Wolf
When designing a distributed embedded system, software AND hardware developers need to deal with several design problems:
Problem #1: We must schedule operations in time, including communication on the network and computations on the processing elements. Clearly, the scheduling of operations on the PEs and the communications between the processing element are linked.
If [...]

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by Wayne Wolf
Embedded computing systems must meet tight cost, power consumption, and performance constraints. If one design requirement dominated, life would be much easier for embedded system designers-they could use fairly standard architectures with easy programming models.

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by Niall Cooling, managing director at embedded training specialist, Feabhas
It feels as if not a day goes by without a new announcement about a major development in multi-core technology. With so much press surrounding multi-core, you have to ask the question “Is it for me?” – can I utilise multi-core technology in my embedded application?
However, [...]

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by Richard Gerber, Aart J.C. Bik, Kevin B. Smith, and Xinmin Tian, Intel Corporation
Abstract
Automatic vectorization of code can fail for many reasons. Due to the fact that the compiler often assumes worst case scenarios, a simple fix is often all that is necessary to ensure that vectorization can be completed. By using diagnostics tools integrated [...]

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by Vincent Zimmer, Michael Rothman, and Suresh Marisetty, Intel Corporation
ABSTRACT: The modern day BIOS is one that has survived in essence for more than 25 years. However, the program and instructions themselves have been changed and adapted to match the ever quickening pace of technological advancement so much to be almost unrecognizable from its origins. [...]

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by Vincent Zimmer, Michael Rothman, and Suresh Marisetty
Abstract
RAS is a critical requirement for enterprise class servers, which includes high availability server platforms. System uptime is measured against the goal of “five nines,” which represents 99.999 percent availability. One of the key aims of manageability software is to help achieve this goal, by implementation functions like [...]

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by Vincent Zimmer, Michael Rothman, and Suresh Marisetty, Intel Corporation
ABSTRACT: The need for a boot solution that is low cost, has a small footprint, offers low boot latencies, and is platform-agnostic is an ever growing one that is becoming more urgent with the increased ubiquity of consumer electronics. This also creates opportunities for CE device [...]

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Pebble Bay will discuss the successful development of BSPs, drivers and other software for these multicore architectures at “Multicore Processors - Embedded Software Network” on Tuesday 5th April at ARM near Cambridge.

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by David Martinez, Vasco Santos, Martin Mc Donnell, Ken Reynolds, and Peter Carlston, Intel Corporation
Abstract
The suitability of Intel® multi-core processors for embedded digital signal processing (DSP) applications is now being reevaluated. Major advances in power-efficient transistor technology, optimized multi-core processor microarchitectures and the evolution of Intel® Streaming SIMD Extensions (Intel® SSE) for vector processing have [...]

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AMD today announced immediate availability of the new AMD Embedded G-Series processor, the world’s first and only Accelerated Processing Unit (APU) for embedded systems. The AMD Embedded G-Series, based on AMD Fusion technology, delivers a complete, full-featured embedded platform and incorporates the new low-power, x86 CPU based on the “Bobcat” core with a world-class DirectX® [...]

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One perspective for thinking of the embedded world is as a spectrum of complexity ranging from ASIC to MCU. ASIC designs are enormously expensive and take years to complete but the potential for innovation is almost unbounded. MCU projects are almost free in comparison and take months or even just weeks to finish, but they [...]

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by Chris Shore, ARM
Our industry moves incredibly quickly. The hot topic last year is very rarely so important this year – either we will have solved it or some other issue will have risen to even greater prominence. The issue of efficiency, however, has been a relatively constant theme through my time in the [...]

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Speaker: Stefan Holdermans (Software Development Engineer, Vector Fabrics)
Date/Time: Wednesday (October 20, 2010) 12:30pm — 1:30pm
Location (room): Show Floor (EmbeddeLive Conference)
Track: Sponsored Session/Seminar
Formats: 60-Minute Sponsored Session
Presentation Abstract
One of the barriers slowing an enthusiastic transition to embedded multicore is the difficulty of parallelizing your functionality. Especially with the C language, subtle dependencies, often due [...]

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Green Hills Software, Inc., the largest independent vendor of embedded software solutions, today announced operating system, middleware and multicore development tool support for NetLogic Microsystems’ industry-leading XLP™ family of multicore, multi-threaded processors. Green Hills Software’s comprehensive portfolio of optimized software solutions includes its multicore-ready INTEGRITY® real-time operating system (RTOS) and MULTI® software development tool set [...]

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by David Bell and Greg Wood
As application complexity continues to grow we have reached a limit on increasing performance by merely scaling clock speed. To meet the ever-increasing processing demand, modern System-On-Chip solutions contain multiple processing cores. The dilemma is how to map applications to multicore devices. In this paper, the authors present a programming [...]

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Cavium Networks is expanding its Octeon II family with two new members that upgrade and double the number of cores available on the communications processors to 32. The new products highlight the growing trend to use of multicore architectures to handle increasing processing needs in broadband networks.
The rise of smart phones, netbooks and other mobile [...]

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By Vincent Perrier
Specifying and validating embedded systems and chips becomes increasingly challenging as feature sets and non-functional constraints grow. It’s especially difficult when the system involves a multicore programmable platform, which includes several processing engines such as microprocessors, microcontrollers or DSPs, that run application software distributed across the various cores.
The development of the hardware (HW) [...]

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