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IP - European Style
by Dick Selwood, Embedded Technology Journal
IP07 was the tenth meeting in Grenoble of IP providers and users under the umbrella of Design and Reuse (www.designandreuse.com), the IP portal. Europe editor Dick Selwood compares facts and marketing-speak.
It sounds like the start of a joke. “There were three processor manufacturers at a conference….” And when the three processor manufacturers were asked, “What is needed to service the power- conscious emerging mobile video marketplace?” they came up with three similar answers. The man from MIPS said that it would be serviced by the ecosystem that has developed around a MIPS architecture with added analog capability from Chipidea, their recent acquisition. The man from ARC said that the true path forward was a reconfigurable, heterogeneous multiprocessor architecture, and there was a family of ARC video sub-systems to prove it. And the man from SiliconHive said that the true way is a coupled massively-parallel architecture with a parallelising compiler, and here is the starting point, the VSP2000 family. The chairman of the panel session was from Cadence, and he said that, whatever the solution, it would need EDA tools that were power-aware.
In fact there was more commonality than a joke might suggest. They all agreed that the power requirements of mobile video – and mobile video was chosen as currently the most processor-intensive and therefore the most power-demanding mobile application - were going to be solved only by a holistic approach, starting with an analysis of the functionality of the device, what it would be doing, and what bits would need to work with other bits for specific tasks. From this it should be possible to build an architectural model to explore different trade-offs and undertake power analysis. The end product could then be designed so that applications would run only those sections that are needed, powering down the rest. True, different trade offs, such as process technologies, clock gating, and software designed for lower power would also help, but the key has to be to look at the high level of the system. [more]
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