Architecture and plurality

Abstract

It's all over for uniprocessors. Future performance advances will rely on the industry's ability to exploit the parallel pipelines made available by single-chip multiprocessors. But making the most of the performance on offer is still a major challenge. Multicore processors are now a familiar to people buying desktop PCs and servers but they are fairly new to most embedded developers, even though some of the first implementations of multi-core architectures turned up in the embedded space. This looks set to change as parallelism becomes the only practical way to address future performance requirements.