Multicore Mania Coming Soon

The consensus for the past few years has been that multicore microprocessors provide the path to higher performance. Still, it came as a surprise to me when putting together the program for the Linley Tech Processor Conference how many talks discuss multicore processing—about two-thirds of the 20+ presentations.

If multicore is truly de rigueur, this in and of itself isn’t news. But there are plenty of new developments going on. The action at the high end is to be expected. Freescale, which qualified its first major dual-core processor (the MPC8572) for production last year and only recently began sampling its eight-core device, is announcing a new multicore processor. LSI is entering the ring with a multicore architecture of its own.

There’s action further down the performance spectrum, too. TranSwitch’s broadband-gateway processor is a multicore implementation. Cavium and Marvell are discussing low-power multicore processors that operate below 5W. IP suppliers are involved as well. IBM has a new CPU core for SMP applications, and MIPS Technologies is presenting a solution to analyzing race conditions in parallel programs.

By looking at parallel programming, MIPS is demonstrating that the people who understand multicore best are software programmers. Continuous Computing and Enea are presenting their software solutions to systems designers seeking to harness multicore processors.

In summary, the multicore approach is not just for high-end implementations; it is for a wide spectrum of designs. The challenge of using multicore processors remains, but software suppliers are easing the transition from the single-core to the multicore era. --Joe

Joseph Byrne, senior analyst