PolyCore’s Brehmer, however, believes the adoption of heterogeneous multiprocessing for small-footprint consumer devices poses a set of problems that differ in kind, as well as degree, from those encountered elsewhere.
“While there are a number of applications in networking and blade environments where multiprocessor environments are possible with existing tools, many embedded designs in consumer and mobile are constrained because of power requirements to operate using an asymmetric model, to get the most efficient use of the silicon,” Brehmer said. “Additionally, they require different types of processors-multiple instantiations of RISC and DSP-difficult to operate in SMP [symmetric multiprocessing] mode.”