Perceptive industry observer Loring Wirbel recently commented on how cheap embedded multi-core devices are, and as a result are being used more in such industries as medical, military, automotive and others.

But are developers thinking hard enough about what they’re doing? Just because you can do something doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do, after all, right?

As Wirbel notes, “embedded applications have space, power, and cost constraints that place two distinct types of restrictions on multicore architectures.” The upshot is they may not give the designer the ultimate bang for the buck, when “a mix of control-plane, datapath, and offline processors that play different roles inside one chip” might work better.

Software developers, he said, need to examine how to partition required tasks across multiple processors in a chip: “When a single chip is parceled into asymmetric modules, software also must manage such tasks as on-chip communication control, in-stream packet processing, inline and offline encryption, and look-aside specialized tasks such as TCP offloads.”

And in the client-server world, as he says, “Software developers could look to the SIMD (single-instruction/multiple-date) and MIMD (multiple-instruction/multiple-date) programming models developed in the high-performance computing world as a guide to planning server performance with multi-core chips.”

Careful partitioning of asymmetric processing, he says, “has arrived in medical, automotive, and mil-aero worlds,” in part through “single chips that could perform control, DSP, and datapath tasks.”

Not only must a multi-core chip for embedded tasks “take full advantage of 45nm and 28nm silicon processes,” as he says, “but the chip vendors must pull together complex software suites. In many cases, chip vendors acquired Linux or real-time OS companies to bring talent in-house, such as Cavium did by acquiring Monta Vista Sofware.

The trick, he says, is to “bundle the hardware modules and software suites into a package appropriate for the lower cost of embedded systems.”

Bottom line, Wirbel thinks it’s “feasible” that multi-cores “can replace single-core chips some day, but their use in embedded apps must be carefully planned.”

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