Santa Clara, Calif. — With many calling programming the biggest obstacle to deployment of multiprocessor systems-on-chip, Multicore Expo convenes here this week to tackle that challenge. Some controversy over rival interprocess communications proposals appears inevitable.
The three-day Expo, the first public event put on by the recently formed Multicore Association, shapes up as a showcase of solutions for multicore architectures and multiprocessing. It underscores the association’s commitment to develop standards for programming heterogeneous, multiple-core ICs that may host different kinds of processors and multiple operating systems.
What these software developers will quickly discover, however, is the difficulty of developing, debugging and deploying software for a device that may include one or more general-purpose CPUs, one or more DSPs and perhaps a specialized processor or two. “There are so many people providing different parts of a solution that if we don’t create standards, none of this stuff is going to work together,” Bruggeman said.