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Gap between embedded software and multicore processors remains wide


By Robert Mullins
April 2, 2008 — 
New industry figures released at an industry conference yesterday show the embedded software industry is beginning to address the gap between the capabilities of applications written for a single core processor world and the growing demand for those applications to take advantage of multicore platforms.

But the gap between multicore processors and optimized software remains sizable, and the hurdles—the burden of legacy code, insufficient programmer skills and the lack of industry standards—remain high, particularly in the embedded space.

The Multicore Association, host of the three-day Multicore Expo conference in Santa Clara, is forming a working group to address the problem of software applications that need to be written, or in many cases rewritten, to get the best performance out of the growing array of multicore processors coming to market. Intel and Microsoft are also supporting new research centers at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and the University of California, Berkeley, promote parallel computing advances that match software capability to multicore processing.

The software industry is changing, but slowly, said Eric Heikkila, director of the embedded hardware practice at the research firm VDC. Although only 6% of software vendors surveyed offered multicore-optimized software in 2007, that number is expected to grow to 40% by 2011, Heikkila reported at the conference.

“The industry has always been able to overcome technical challenges, and it’s extremely likely that multicore [challenges] will be overcome as well,” he told his audience.

Demand for multicore processor-based products will force them to catch up, Heikkila continued, as sales of multicore products are forecast to hit US$2.47 billion by 2011, from $372 million in 2007.

Multicore software growth is constrained by the amount of legacy code already used in many embedded applications. A VDC survey of enterprises showed that 88% of the embedded software they’re running on multicore processors is written in C or C++, which may be difficult to convert to multicore.

“I’ve had customers say, ‘I have this code base that’s been running for 16 years uninterrupted and it’s a nuclear power plant control system. I really would like to take advantage of multicore, but I don’t really want to touch that code,’” explained Doug Davis, vice president and general manager of the embedded group at Intel.

Intel will be offering training in multicore software at an Intel Developer Forum this week in Shanghai, China, and at another IDF in August in San Francisco, Davis added.

Competition among vendors is also hampering agreement on industry standards, added Markus Levy, president of the Multicore Association. “There are still a lot of companies who have their own proprietary products and want to keep it proprietary. It’s always difficult to get them to admit that standards are inevitable.”

But the future of multicore is brighter in writing new applications than rewriting old ones, said Wen-mei Hwu, a University of Illinois professor speaking at the conference.

“The many opportunities of many cores are in new revolutionary applications,” Hwu said.


Related Search Term(s): Multicore Processors


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