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Three Cores make a Crowd — or a Problem
A common question from simulation users to us simulation providers is “can I simulate a machine with N cores”, where N is “large”. As if running lots of cores was a simulation system or even a hardware...
View ArticleEnea and Freescale Article on SMP OS
Elektronik i Norden just published a technical insight article about the SMP kernels of Enea OSE and Linux, by Patrik Strömblad and Jonas Svennebring. It has a nice discussion about AMP and SMP, and OS...
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EETimes.com – Multicore CPUs face slow road in comms
The EETimes article Multicore CPUs face slow road in comms piqued my interest. There is an interesting chart in there about just how slow more-than-one-core processors will be in penetrating a vaguely...
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When does Hardware Acceleration make Sense in Networking?
Yes, when does hardware acceleration make sense in networking? Hardware acceleration in the common sense of “TCP offload”. This question was answered by a very nicely reasoned “no” in an article by...
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Parallelism in Action
Last year in a blog post on video encoding for the iPod Nano, I complained about the lack of performance on my old Athlon. A bit later, I noted that (obviously) video encoding is a good example of an...
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Cavium Octeon II: Short Notes
About two months ago, Cavium Networks launched their second generation of Octeon chips, the Octeon II. The most obvious difference to the previous generation (Octeon, Octeon Plus) is a new MIPS64 core...
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Coding Horror on Big Iron Hardware
In a post from late June, Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror discusses the horrible cost of a large HP server (scaling up to 32 processor cores in eight AMD x86 sockets), compared to a bunch of simple...
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Downloadable Book about Embedded Multicore
Freescale has now released the collected, updated, and restyled book version of the article series on embedded multicore that I wrote last year together with Patrik Strömblad of Enea, and Jonas...
View ArticleSiCS Multicore Day 2009
Last Friday, I attended this year’s edition of the SiCS Multicore Day. It was smaller in scale than last year, being only a single day rather than two days. The program was very high quality...
View ArticleGPGPU – a new type of DSP?
My post on SiCS multicore, as well as the SiCS multicore day itself, put a renewed spotlight on the GPGPU phenomenon. I have been following this at a distance, since it does not feel very applicable to...
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Freescale P4080, in Physical Form
Past Tuesday, I attended the Freescale Design With Freescale (DWF) one-day technology event in Kista, Stockholm. This is a small-scale version of the big Freescale Technology Forum, and featured four...
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How (Not) To Present Parallel Programming Results
SCDSource ran a short but good article summarizing a few DAC talks that I would liked to attend. it mostly about the experience of long-term parallel programming research David Bailey in presenting...
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Wind River Blog: True Concurrency is Different
I have another blog up at Wind River. This one is about multicore bugs that cannot happen on multithreaded systems, and is called True Concurrency is Truly Different (Again). It bounces from a recent...
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SecurityNow on Randomness
Episodes 299 and 301 of the SecurityNow podcast deal with the problem of how to get randomness out of a computer. As usual, Steve Gibson does a good job of explaining things, but I felt that there was...
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Memory Models: x86 is TSO, TSO is Good
By chance, I got to attend a day at the UPMARC Summer School with a very enjoyable talk by Francesco Zappa Nardelli from INRIA. He described his work (along with others) on understanding and modeling...
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Nvidia “Kal-El” Variable SMP
Nvidia recently announced that their already-known “Kal-El” quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 SoC actually contains five processor cores, not just four as a “normal” quad-core would. They call the architecture...
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SiCS Multicore Day 2012
The 2012 edition of the SiCS Multicore Day was fun, like they have always been in the past. I missed it in 2010 and 2011, but could make it back this year. It was interesting to see that the points...
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Two Cores, Four Cores, Eight Cores – Mobile Variety
Probably thanks to the yearly Mobile World Congress, there have been a slew of recent announcements of mobile application processors recently. Everything is ARM-based, but show quite some variety in...
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David May on Multicore: Heterogeneity not Needed
Via the EETimes, I found a very interesting talk by Bristol professor David May, presented at the 4th Annual Bristol Multicore Challenge, in June of 2013. The talk can be found as a Youtube movie here,...
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Thin Phone, Fat Core
When mobile phones first appeared, they were powered by very simple cores like the venerable ARM7 and later the ARM9. Low clock frequencies, zero microarchitectural sophistication, sufficient for the...
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