Embedded Technology Journal Update

a techfocus media publication :: June 26, 2007 :: volume VII, no. 12

FROM THE EDITOR

This week, the Freescale Technology Forum (FTF) is in full swing in Orlando, Florida, Freescale started their own event with a bang with the announcement of their multi-core strategy – a broad architecture, infrastructure, and ecosystem announcement that will define a large portion of the company’s product direction for years to come. Our latest feature article looks at Freescale’s concept of multi-core processing for embedded systems.

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Kevin Morris – Editor
Embedded Technology Journal

ANNOUNCEMENTS

MIPS Unveils First Synthesizable Processors to Break 1 GHz

MIPS32® 74K™ Delivers Superior Performance, Power efficiencies
First synthesizable 32-bit processors to achieve frequencies > than 1 GHz in TSMC 65nm process technology. Perfect for consumer space--IPTV, HD DVD, Blu-ray Disc and 802.11n--where high-performance, low power and system costs are critical.

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CURRENT FEATURE ARTICLES

Freescale Goes Multi-Core
Comprehensive Roadmap Shows Strategy
Launching Linux
Open Source OS Off to Space
Parallel Processing Considered Not Harmful
by Dick Selwood, Embedded Technology Journal
Enigmatic EDA
DAC Highlights Dilemma
Flying Embedded Technology
When Business and Pleasure Overlap
Cranking up the MIPS
Introducing the 74K
William Shockley
Dick Selwood reviews "Broken Genius"
LeanPath Weighs In
Choosing Between Open-source and Commercial OS

JOURNAL WEBCASTS

LatticeXP2 FPGAs: SRAM + Embedded Flash = No Compromise, Full-Featured Non-Volatile FPGA Design Solutions sponsored by Lattice

Learn to Design with Stratix III FPGAs’ Programmable Power Technology & Selectable Core Voltage sponsored by Altera

Using Processors in FPGAs? The industry's only soft IP ARM7 core for Flash FPGAs sponsored by Actel

Low Power FPGA design with Actel IGLOO, the 5µW FPGA for cool portables sponsored by Actel

ARM7, Analog,Flash and FPGA in a Single Chip Actel's ARM in Fusion sponsored by Actel

Introducing Actel Fusion – the world’s first Flash-based FPGA, with Memory and Analog front end sponsored by Actel

Introducing Spartan-3AN FPGAs – Non-Volatile Secure Platform for Highest System Integration sponsored by Xilinx

Freescale Goes Multi-Core
Comprehensive Roadmap Shows Strategy

The math is simple. When the amount of power required to double the speed of one processor far exceeds the amount of power required for two processors, it’s time to be thinking about multi-core. This idea has been around for at least thirty years. We all knew it would eventually happen. Supercomputing was probably the first to fall. The giant monolithic supercomputer was rendered obsolete by massively parallel processing arrays years ago. In the desktop computing world, we have made the jump from single core to multi-core for high-end machines within the last two years. For the embedded systems world, it appears that the time is now.

Freescale announced an expansive and comprehensive multi-core strategy this week. The strategy includes a description of the company’s new multi-core microarchitecture, a simulation/virtual platform environment to support software development, and a process announcement that the new technology will be implemented in 45nm silicon.

Multi-core poses significant challenges on both the hardware and the software side. The fundamental challenge in hardware is to try to make one plus one equal something near two. If your effective available processing power doesn’t scale reasonably well with the increasing number of processor cores, our simple math equation (the one that justified multi-core in the first place) starts to break down. [more]