Multicore processors are becoming the norm as chipmakers address challenges of increasing performance demands. Intel's Sandy Bridge and upcoming Haswell CPUs have multiple cores, as do mobile processors from nVidia and Qualcomm. While adding cores provides more processing power and addresses design complexity issues, software must also be optimized to take advantage of parallelism. Multicore architectures shift complexity to software programming and tools are needed to help developers leverage multiple cores effectively.

1. having attended several technology shows at the
lticore
beginning of the year, it’s clear to me that multicore
Mu
is finally really happening, and it’s happening fast.
Intel’s Sandy Bridge started shipping in January, One way to make processors more powerful is
with four x86 cores on board. Haswell, Intel’s to introduce more pipeline stages, and increase
next architecture revision, defaults to eight the clock rate. More pipeline stages means
a screen near you
cores. At the Mobile World Congress, nVidia there’s less work done per stage. In addition,
coming to
showed off their Kal-El mobile phone and driving up the clock requires a higher voltage,
tablet processor with a quad core inside and resulting in a more than linear power increase,
targeted to go into production in August this since power scales with the square of voltage.
brics
arketing Vector fa year. Qualcomm announced their new Krait This isn’t a very power-efficient approach,
By Marco Jacobs, Vp M architecture, which includes up to four cores and already some time ago frequencies have
also. TI announced their new 10GHz DSP which
, stopped scaling when new process technology
contains 8 high-performance VLIW cores nodes were introduced. Using multiple cores
running at 1.25GHz. Graphics architectures went lowers the average clock frequency, thus
from simple pixel pushing pipelines, to include reducing energy consumption, even if there are
virtex engines, then added programmable more cores active at the same time. Multicore
shaders and are now becoming general is here because it addresses the power
purpose multicore computer engines that are consumption challenge.
seeing rapid market adoption. This weekend, a
friend of mine showed me his new phone, the When VLIW processors were introduced, they
LG Optimus 2X. The “2X” label stands for dual shifted computer architecture complexity
core; multicore is even becoming a topic the toward the compiler. History now repeats itself
marketeers get excited about and highlight with multicore architectures. The complexity
as a main product feature. is shifted away from the hardware, into the
software. It’s too late for a paradigm shift in
Why is everyone going multicore now? software programming to adopt new parallel
Multicore is here since it solves several programming languages though. There’s too
challenges. much legacy code, there is a lot of software
tools infrastructure and learning a new
Many applications can be significantly sped language isn’t easy. One way to hide parallel
up through parallisation. Higher resolution complexity is behind APIs, and there are many:
and multi-channel audio combined with Pthreads, OpenCL, OpenMP CUDA and others.
,
high-definition, 3D video yields a better media Using APIs is a good idea, but only solves part
experience. A media player contains graphics, of the problem. Structuring your code to take
ore now?
veryone going multic s
“
audio and video, each of which can be split up advantage of these parallel APIs is the real
Why is e over multicore cores to give more performance. challenge. New programming tools are needed
ce it solve
Multicore is here sin
Augmented reality and high quality gaming to analyze and partition the application in
”
requires lots of demanding computer order to take advantage of the many multicore
several challenges.
operations. Consumers want their browsers to systems already shipping into the marketplace,
load and render web pages instantly. Screen and to harvest their available computing
and camera resolutions are forever increasing capacity. Multicore is here, and here to stay.
to present and capture highest-quality imagery. The crux is in the programming.
Multicore is here because it addresses the
challenge of satisfying this need for speed.
Designing a processor that is twice as
powerful as the previous generation is no
small task. Deeper pipelines, out-of-order,
speculative issues, and superscalar execution
all improve performance, but at diminishing
returns. Ultimate performance goes up, but
performance per square millimeter of Silicon for the latest microcontrollers
actually goes down. Not so with multicore, and processors available from RS,
which is relatively easy to implement. Simply go to rswww.com/electronics
replicate the design, and add interconnect.
It’s much simpler to implement a quad core
processor, than to increase a single processor’s get more online...
performance fourfold. Multicore is here because Share your views at
it solves the hardware design challenge to www.designspark.com/etech
deliver more performance.
20 eTech - ISSUE 7 eTech - ISSUE 7 21

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