Part of this fundamental shift by systems engineers must be
to rethink their design approach. If it’s a bottom-up approach
in which the processing requirements are determined based on
performance, memory, and other system-related parameters, it
could spell disaster downstream.
“If you are thinking about business application software, you
think from the top down, from the software to the hardware. In
the embedded space, we still think from the bottom up, which
creates slow development processes and missed opportunity
because the product gets out too late,” says Michel Genard,
vice president of marketing for Virtutech.
According to Genard, around 50% of embedded designs
never see the light of day because of this flawed way of thinking,
and designs are driven based on performance parameters
and not business requirements. “Instead, we need iterative
hardware and software development that speeds overall timeto-
market,” says Genard.
To improve your chances, consider a system-level virtualizing
approach to the software rather than a componentlevel
approach (see the figure). When done right, Genard
notes, this approach “provides the speed, scalability, and
control necessary for successful concurrent software/hardware
development.”
HERE TO STAY • As more silicon is delivered with multicore
architectures, marketing departments for companies large and
small will continue to find uses for them. Therefore, we must
embrace multicore and continue to research the ideal architecture/
software mix to stay on the leading edge.
To that end, it would appear all paths for multicore lead to
parallel programming, along with more sophisticated architecture
solutions for intra-processor communications and the
promise of software transactional memory. According to Agarwal,
we must change how cores are connected and determine
the ideal size of resources, arguing that distributed meshes and
smaller cache sizes are the wave of the future.
With so many problems plaguing multicore, there’s a huge
potential for startups to take the lead and maybe one day find a
job for all of those unemployed threads and cores.