The Multicore Association is establishing specifications for a programming model that will reduce the complexity involved in writing software for multicore chips used in smartphones, tablets and other embedded systems.
The association is putting together a cohesive set of foundation APIs (application programming interfaces) to standardize communication, resource sharing and virtualization spanning cores on the same or different chips, said Markus Levy, the group’s president.
Chip makers are adding CPUs, sensors and accelerators to chips as an energy-efficient way to boost application performance on devices. But multicore chips have also created a challenge for programmers, who have to write applications that scale across multiple cores and synchronize correctly to ensure calculations are executed in a certain order to get the correct output.