What About All Those Cores?
The introduction of multicore processors in a slew of battery-powered devices is an interesting development. The ARM processor now comes in quad-core configurations, and the Intel Atom processor is now shipping in a dual-core configurations.
We can only assume there will be more cores at each new process node, and probably more cores added at each rev of existing process nodes. But what do we actually do with all those cores.
Aside from threading applications onto two or even four cores, the extra cores are largely wasted. As Freescale’s Lisa Su pointed out, there’s a big difference between adding eight cores and getting eight times the performance. Or in battery-powered devices, maybe it’s a question of achieving higher performance and longer time between charges.
The glaring disconnect in consumer electronics engineering is that we know how to create the cores—and that’s no small feat—but we don’t know how to effectively utilize them. In the plug-in server world the answer has been virtualization, because very few applications are parallel enough to take advantage of multiple cores natively. Databases and some graphics applications are the exception.
In the consumer world, the number of applications that can utilize multiple cores effectively is far fewer. That leaves end-device manufacturers scrambling to find uses for those cores. In some cases, the solution has been assigning specific cores for specific functions, and matching power and performance with application need. In most others, designers are left scratching their heads.
The addition of virtualization to consumer electronics may change all of that, but it also may change the dynamics of engineering these chips. There will be additional burdens on the software engineers to manage power, and there will be additional burdens on the hardware engineers to make sure there are no resource shortfalls caused by poor prioritization. And all of this will create more challenges for the verification engineers, whose ranks will need to grow significantly just to get chips out the door.
The engineering community is about to cross over from just creating the chips to figuring out how to use them more effectively—at the architectural and design level. And from here on, things should get very interesting.
–Ed Sperling
