wind river multicore regional conference oct 2010 - don dingee

Don DingeeOctober 20, 2010

Wind River Multicore Regional Conference

Solving the Multicore Maze:Today’s Challenges, Trends, and Solutions

The maze looks confusing

• What is a multicore processor capable of?• How does development have to change?• Will my application benefit from multicore?

“People don’t understand what they have.”- Tony King-Smith, Imagination Technologies

What you don’t know can hurt

Charts courtesy VDC, September 2010“NEXT GENERATION EMBEDDED HARDWARE ARCHITECTURES: Driving Onset of Project Delays, Costs Overruns, and Software Development Challenges”

Somebody is seeing the way

• SoCs• General purpose CPUs• Graphics processors (GPUs)• Network processors (NPUs)

Entering the maze is easy

Huge numbers of SoCs

Is this single core, or multicore?

One flavor of CPU

But wait, there’s more

Another flavor of CPU

GPU

1600 streams in this, latest has 3200

NPU

32 cores designed around the network interface

Now that we’re in the maze

• It’s not getting smaller, or simpler – but that’s creating disruptive opportunity• Integration of EDA, silicon, operating

systems, and tools providers is increasing• Competitive advantage = understanding

your goal and what your app is trying to do• There will still be multiple approaches and

tools, and no “magic bullet”

Understand the platform

Leverage the OS and runtime SW

Look around threading

Expose bugs dynamically

Looking deeper into threads

Hybrid approaches

Higher level middleware

So what, so what, …

• Range and speed of innovation is incredible• Embedded devices are connected life now

Smartphones everywhere

Lots of drivers here:• Reliable connection• User interface• Multimedia streaming• Secure transactions• More apps by the hour

Tablets taking over

• Just watch while most PCs get replaced in next couple years

• More space for multicore, battery means even more innovation coming

Digital home taking off

• TVs and STBs are gaining app content

• Watch 2 channels, record 2, plus over the top content stream

Appliances getting smarter

• Wake on data• Do the job• Be aware• Sleep

Eye in the sky

• More mission, but less room onboard

• Very dense and fast compute core requirements

In the network

• Deep packet inspection becoming mandatory

• Look at every packet in transit• Make very sophisticated

decisions based on content: security, priority, handling

What will you do next?

Multicore is your next career!• This is just as big as the transition from digital

logic to microprocessors• Or the transition from assembly to C• It will take some retraining, rethinking, redoing• The vendors get it and are actually ahead of the

customers in most cases• Gap will close fast as competitive forces take over

– just look at the applications we saw

Left to my own devices

@dondingee

www.linkedin.com/in/dondingee

ddingee@opensystemsmedia.com

www.embedded-computing.com

http://channels.opensystemsmedia.com/Multicore