Article by Charles Murray, Senior Technical Editor, Electronics & Test
As multicore processing architectures grow in popularity, suppliers are rolling out solutions to help engineers program the new breed of devices.
PolyCore Software is offering a new version of its Poly-Platform that includes a graphical tool to map applications to multicore architectures. The tool is targeted at the telecom, datacom, military, aerospace, and process control sectors, but it can serve in virtually any application being migrated from the single-core world to the multicore one. The idea is to help engineers deal with the technical barriers inherent in splitting up applications to run on multiple cores in the same chip.
“For people who get used to single-core programming, the move to multicore can be challenging,” Zihong Lin, strategic marketing manager for the multicore business at Texas Instruments (TI), told us. “The environment is different. They have to think out partitioning the software and syncing up all the tasks between the cores.”