Unleashing the Power of Multi-Core MCUs by AUTOSAR Communication Stack Software Distribution

Abstract

Until 2005 the software development in the area of mainstream computing enjoyed a free lunch profiting from the exponential growth of transistor densities and resulting clock speeds of Moore's Law. Existing software benefitted from hardware changes without requiring modification. In 2005, however, mainstream computing hit a wall due to the limit in increasing the clock speed. As a result, chip manufacturers started to turn towards hyperthreading and homogeneous and later on heterogeneous multi-core architectures in order to achieve further performance gains. To benefit from these hardware changes, existing software had to be parallelized and modified to deal with the heterogeneity. The period of the unicore free lunch was over.